Mend, You Homespun Sorrow
by LoquaciousQuark
Summary: Post-"Here Lies the Abyss." At the Inquisition's most desperate hour, Hawke made the choice to stay behind in the Fade. Fenris refuses to leave her there.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: **HaHA! You thought that just because it's been a few years, I might write something without a massive pre-fic note? Incorrect! As per usual, I have a number of people to thank for this fic being written, first and foremost of whom are jadesabre301 and eponymous-rose (on tumblr), without whose magnificent and detailed betas this fic would be infinitely worse. (And as usual, in Jade's case, much shorter.) I realized when I sent this off that Jade has now been reading my Fenris for almost nine years; words cannot express how thankful I am that she continues to spend so much time reading characters she's not particularly fond of for no reward but my gratitude and the pleasure of making mediocre writing better. Anything worthwhile in this piece belongs to either her insight or Rose's gentle corrections, especially as regards my addictive emdash tendencies. Thank you both.

I also need to thank a few people in the Fenris fandom for seeding and encouraging my urge to write creatively again after a long, long drought, even if they didn't realize it. Specifically, I'd like to thank theherocomplex and aban-asaara (also on tumblr) for continuing to tell such beautiful, articulate, and often mastercrafted tales about our favorite characters; you reminded me that just because the fandom has changed doesn't mean there aren't still wonderful stories here to be shared and loved for how they touch us. (Not that this is necessarily one of them, but still.)

Finally, I'd like to assure anyone reading that as always, this fic is completely written as of this posting and will not be abandoned. I plan to update Fridays pending any final edits. There is a small, unedited prologue available at tinyurl dot com / y4368mm4 if you'd like to read it.

**Warnings:** Unreality, references to psychological and physical torture, sexual content.

For everyone who's stuck with me over the years, and to anyone who's checking out my nonsense for the first time—thank you. I hope you enjoy it.

* * *

"Ay," said the Captain, reverentially; "it's a almighty element. There's wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling. Think on it when the stormy nights is so pitch dark," said the Captain, solemnly holding up his hook, "as you can't see your hand afore you, excepting when the wiwid lightning reweals the same; and when you drive, drive, drive through the storm and dark, as if you was a driving, head on, to the world without end . . ."  
—_Dombey and Son_, Charles Dickens

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.  
—Aristotle

—

The corpse—is _Hawke_.

He'd thought it one of the many shades left stranded in this horror-world, another mimicry of steel and bone and shadow of some ancient war long forgotten; and then the strange green light of the Fade had gleamed off its armor with the shift of a breath—of a living, impossible _breath—_and his own had stopped completely.

A living creature. Hawke.

_Hawke. _

Four months—

Four _months_, and she is _dead_—

He drops to his knees, sword-point catching on stone-cracks and twisting awkwardly, his nerveless fingers barely able to keep the clutch. "_Hawke_," he says, as if the word means anything here. No echo on these dead rocks, no sound but the hard thudding in his ears—

The black head lifts, lank, oily hair displaced over one cut and swollen ear, the low tail's tie long severed so that the strands hang tangled in her broken gorget. She tilts just enough for one eye to pierce him through, a stark crown-blue gone colder than he remembers, and then it drops again into the dark and his heart _will not beat._

"I should have known," Hawke whispers, and her voice, her voice, her _voice _who was dead and is now alive! An afterthought in a tumble of Fade-boulders, wrong for the shape, covered all in spider-silk and old dried blood in the gloom beneath Nightmare's corpse. Both legs stretched forward, broken; head bowed as if in sorrow; both arms pulled back behind, pinioned by the fine white threads that slather every open space in this Fade-clearing around the bloated carcass. "After all this time, I should have known…"

"Hawke," he says again, helpless litany, and she begins to laugh.

So bitter. So _empty_, from Hawke who has always brimmed overfull with mirth, who has stood death in hand and smiled at its taking, who cradled Fenris's own heart away from the long thorns that caged it and stayed until they unwound themselves again. She laughs like her skin is hollow, and when she is done she rolls her head back on her shoulders until she stares straight up into the Fade-green skies. "Don't tell me," she says, and even through her tone's acidity there is something in his soul that sings at the sounding of it— "you've come to take me home."

He can see her face. Her hair has fallen away, and after months of grief rotting out his heart here is her face at last, turned away from the Void after all. Her eyes are the same, even if the whites are reddened with tears and blood. Her cheekbones still hold the same high curve, even with her cheeks skull-thin with famine; here is her long nose, her precious mouth almost too wide for her face. New grooves at its corners, at the corners of her eyes. New slashed scars down the plane of her jaw.

Fenris closes his eyes. He forces his heart to steady as he sheathes his sword and drags one gauntlet free so his bare hand might close this last little distance. Four inches—four _months_, and all at once his fingers curl around the back of her neck, sliding into her filthy hair like a prayer, his thumb feathering down the pulse in her throat that beats _alive, alive, alive, alive. _

"Yes," he says, and Merrill's palm drops onto his own shoulder, brace and warning in one. "We have come for you."

"Well, thank the Maker. He knows I've been waiting long enough."

The words are light, but the tone's cold enough to burn, and Fenris must pull on the earliest memories of his training to keep the agony from his face. "This is no Fade illusion, Hawke. I swear to you, this is real."

"You've been searching for months," Hawke says, a recitation empty as a sea-washed shell, her lips curled sharp. "You've gone to the ends of the earth. You've sought out—oh, who is it this time? Merrill, Lady Trevelyan and…is that Dorian? What an unusual group! Tell me all about the ways you've spent your sleepless nights hunting me down in the vast nothingness of the Fade. Tell me all _about _them, Fenris."

"Inquisitor," Dorian urges, and Trevelyan sucks in a sharp breath before stepping a few dozen paces away. The unmistakable _shinck _of her knives sliding free tells him he is not the only one who does not trust the laws of this place. The green-gold fog of the Fade swirls oddly in her wake, a living thing as much as the whispers at the edge of his hearing, and Fenris swallows down the fear.

Hawke sees it; Hawke laughs again, off-key and mad. "Oh, agony! How your heart must be breaking all over again. But who am I to argue after all this time—please, _Fenris_, carry us away through the last rift left in the world, or to the miracle somniari that walks near this place in the Fade, or whatever deus ex machina you've contrived for this particular rescue. I can hardly wait to see what new and exciting ways this dream will shred me to pieces at the last minute."

Dorian kneels, then, his embroidered black-and-copper cloak spilling over his thighs like an upended wineskin, his half-gloved fingers dancing gold flames over Hawke's broken legs. Both crooked—both _badly _so, one knee bent at entirely the wrong angle so that Fenris's stomach lurches when he sees it, the other shin bone-pierced and swollen twice its proper size, purple and shiny and half-healed in every wrong way. The colossal shadow of Nightmare drapes over them all, grotesque and obscene, too many withered spider-legs curled in upon themselves and spearing skyward. The hole Hawke blew through its body lingers still, charred flame-edges marking the remnants of her rage, but every time Fenris blinks the corpse-thing shivers at the edges of his vision, and more than once he must convince himself it has not moved.

The Nightmare has not moved. It has _not_—

Hawke is staring at him.

Smiling, too, as Dorian's hands flicker from gold to blue-white flame over her broken legs; as the Inquisitor circles the edges of the clearing in watchward warning, bending to clear random rubble and kick aside collapsed detritus; as Merrill makes a tight loop to Hawke's other side and kneels to touch her face. "Look at you," Hawke says, and begins to drag her arm between them before her strength yields to the stronger silk and her hand falls limp in air again. "You're not the best I've seen, but you're close. The ears are too long."

Merrill laughs, sorrowing and sweet, and smooths Hawke's hair from her eyes. "Hardly much we can do about that, can we?" she says, light as she's ever been; her wrist flicks, and the spider silk wrapped thousandfold around Hawke's right wrist falls away with a whisper. Her arm drops, stone-hard and heavy, and Merrill barely turns the knifeblade back to safety before catching her by elbow and shoulder to slow the fall. "There, lethallan! Isn't that better? Lean forward, and I'll cut away the rest."

Hawke does, though it's less a lean than a controlled collapse. Her eyes glitter like ice as Merrill cuts away the spider silk entangling her wrists, her waist, her thighs, even the ends of her hair; it clings to her like grasping fingers, even when Merrill pulls it wholly free, and for one horrific moment when Merrill slices through the band cuffing Hawke's neck the raw ends lift and _reach_ once more, a thousand wriggling white worms clutching at her throat, needling, driving deeper into her skin, ignoring every frantic pull both Fenris and Dorian make at their threads—

Fenris cannot see what Merrill does. Her magic is thick to him, oily and tinged with bloodrust; he can only feel it pulse through the lyrium like a bloom of black ink through water, her fingertips at the root of the white snake where it meets the boulder Hawke leans against. The spider silk gives one great shudder, then falls limp, every thread as dead as the Nightmare-corpse that shadows them.

Dorian recoils, the blue-white light cupped in his hands pluming into nothing. "What was _that_?"

"A curse," Merrill offers. Her voice is distant. "A memory…"

"A promise," Hawke murmurs, grinning, even as the Inquisitor stirs at her watch behind them.

Fenris knows what Trevelyan will say even as she straightens, even eas she shades her eyes against a sunless light. One dagger gives a dull glint in the raised, clenched fist at her forehead; the second spins between the fingers of her other hand fretfully, thoughtlessly, at her hip. "I'm sorry," she says. "They're coming."

Dorian's level gaze shifts to meet Fenris's own. They'd known this risk, known the moment they worked magic in the Fade that the spirits and demons who lived there would seek them out to kill them—and yet, somehow, he'd thought they'd have more _time. _If only they'd been able to wait for Varric— "This is beyond my skill," Dorian admits at last, straightforward, sea-calm. "She must have a surgeon. I can do nothing else here."

Each hidden catch to his gauntlet snaps shut again, little clicks all in a row like fingers breaking. "Can she be carried?"

"Certainly," Dorian says, though his mouth twists. "She'll be in agony for the entirety of the walk, of course, but do we have much choice at this point, really?"

No choice at all. Fenris lurches to his feet, unsteady still with the rocking sway of a heart given back its beating, and bends again to where Hawke lies in the shadow of corpse and stone. "I'm sorry," he breathes, as if it will matter, as if it has ever mattered, and lifts her by waist and thigh from the place where she has lain undying for four months.

Hawke screams. Screams again, one broken leg unbending and grotesque in profile, the other bent too far over the places where Fenris holds her, and she shoves mindlessly at his chest, his shoulder, his jaw, scrabbling without purchase for relief from the pain. There's no strength to her; there's no _weight_, and even as the lyrium floods from both proximity and emotion he's enough himself to realize her leathers hang like empty drapes on her bones, that her upper arms have gone thin as her wrists. No weight. No strength. The wildest mage he has ever known, now nothing but a guttered candle—

"Oh, _Fenris_," Hawke says, gasping, laughing, and the tears streak down her temples into her hair. "Do it. Run. Who gives a shit—the last time you came you tore me open with Carver's sword, and _that _was novel enough, but what's that to a little old-fashioned torture? Run. _Run_."

He cannot do this. The Inquisitor has come to meet them, her own eyes too bright at this shell of the Champion he holds, and they must go, they _must—_every instant wasted here is another demon drawn. By now even he, no mage, can smell the reek of sulfur and pitted charcoal, and _still_ he can't, can't—

"Look," Trevelyan says sharply, and Fenris stares, aghast, as a vile creature slithers out from the stained, matted fur of Hawke's collar to nestle along the hollow of her throat. Black, moist, undulating—leech-like, if leeches were as long as his forearm and twice as thick—and when he shifts Hawke's weight to tear the thing away it curls around the base of her neck and sinks a round row of sharp teeth into the skin beneath her left ear.

Hawke does not flinch. Barely even blinks, even as Fenris snarls and Dorian takes two abrupt steps forward before snatching at the creature's girth in one revolting squeeze. The round wet teeth hold their snag on her throat a moment longer, then rip free with a spray of Hawke's blood into open air. Dorian closes his eyes, clenches his fist; on the exhale lightning blows out both ends of the leech like a firecracker, and he flings the desiccated corpse as far into the mists as he can. The Fade-green fog parts, swirls, sighs, and comes together again in its wake, solid as if it had never been rent.

"What was that?" Fenris snaps. Hawke still hardly seems to care; now her head has turned away from his, her eyes half-lidded, more than enough to bare the new-bleeding circle the size of a fist beneath her ear. More, too, now that he knows what to look for: circles both new and old, tens, dozens, hundreds, fresh-scabbed and old-scarred, white rings dancing down both sides of her throat and across her shoulders where her armor has torn, across her bare upper arms, the backs of her hands, her palms, her legs where they are broken. Four months—

Four months—

"That was Despair," says Dorian. The creases at the corners of his eyes are tighter than Fenris has ever seen them, but he will not look Fenris in the face. "I'm afraid time marches on, Inquisitor."

"Fenris, I'm sorry. There were at least twenty I saw, and more coming."

He shakes his head, his throat too tight to speak. It's all too much—Hawke returned to him against all odds, against all _rights_, the dead brought back to life—and this life no life at all, a horrored half-life feeding the demons of this Fade against her will—but _alive_, and—

He takes one hard step. The jolt is enough Hawke shrieks, and _venhedis, _he wants to _weep_—but the sulfur stench is overpowering now, and even from this little promontory he can see the red glow and oily black smoke of growing rage in the valley below. Only minutes, then, only minutes, and if this is the price of her survival…

Another step. Another, and another, and they run at last, Hawke's head tucked tight beneath his chin, his gauntlets curled so hard into her leathers the wide straps strip and split beneath the pressure and she is screaming, screaming, _laughing_, and he will break apart from this, he knows, nothing more than fired white clay dashed upon the rocks.

"Creators," Merrill gasps, and swings before him so suddenly he nearly falls. "Lethallan, lethallan—"

"_Merrill_," Fenris says, startled.

Her eyes are sharp as bird-bones, defiant. "I can help her. Let me do this. I can take away the pain, at least for now—help her sleep until we've gone back again."

He recoils instinctively, and even that motion is enough that Hawke gives a sharp, agonized groan. "You—_no_. You will not use blood magic on _Hawke, _not _here _of all places—"

"This is _hurting_ her!"

"Don't worry," Hawke says, mouth bowed into an enormous smile, reaching for Merrill with a hand gone nearly skeletal. "Flames, don't you know he does this every time?"

His throat burns, the lump high and hot and hard enough to choke. Trevelyan says nothing, her face open with grief and little understanding, lit green from below where her anchored hand clenches over her chest; Dorian knows more of what this will cost, and the slow, near-imperceptible nod he gives Fenris has all the weight of Tevinter's heavy history behind it.

Fenris cannot speak the word aloud. Still, Merrill sees it, and when she reaches up he does not draw away; she swipes one thumb through the blood tracing down Hawke's throat and presses that thumb to her own tongue. He watches Hawke's blood vanish, sickened, and then Merrill places one slender hand on Hawke's forehead and the other on her heart and between one heartbeat and the next the world—stops.

He will not move. No softness left to Merrill now; she stares into Hawke's eyes in a wordless shout. Hawke's lips part, the tendons of her throat gone taut as wires; and she _sighs_, easier than she has yet breathed since they found her, and her brow relaxes all at once. Her eyes do not fall wholly shut, but the madness is not so violent, and when Fenris takes a tentative step forward she does nothing more than lean her head against his armored chest complacently.

He would thank her, because even with the price this painlessness is a gift, but as he opens his mouth Merrill covers her eyes with the heels of her hands and begins to weep.

"I'm so sorry," she gasps, her voice hitching, and Trevelyan lopes back a pace or two to place a comforting hand on her back. "I'm so sorry—she fought me—I saw—"

Saw—

But flame roars over the ridge behind them like an opening storm, and there is no more time. Trevelyan shouts; Dorian twists to throw an open palm at their backs and a wall of ice sprays outward in a terrible arc. Even that is a delay of only moments as they turn and _run_; the Fade has sensed the magic here, Dorian's and Merrill's and Hawke's, and when Fenris chances a glance over his shoulder there is nothing at the ridge's edge but death. Rage, mostly, seething towers of fire and smoke and spitting brimstone; between them spill the roiling ripples of hunger and fear and one-eyed sloth, and more than one stretched shadow tells him Pride has come for its pound of flesh as well. More than twenty. More than fifty now, if he must guess, and the fume of more power yet over the horizon.

_He will not allow it_. Four months and ritual upon ritual and his feet pounding on the bleak stark rock of the living Fade itself—he bares his teeth, Hawke clenched tight enough to him his arms ache. His pulse echoes back through her skin; his eyes lock forward, focused on nothing but Dorian's billowing black cloak and the Inquisitor's armored back, tall and narrow, the empty leather sheaths for her daggers half-hidden by the carelessly slung staff.

Not a thousand yards to spare in the chase. Merrill's staff spins a great circle in the air above her, then slams blade-first into the earth as she runs. Stones crack like shattered glass even as Fenris sprints across them; a chasm drops open in his wake, yawning a hundred feet wide and twice as deep. The demons slow, snarling, a wild sound like mountains tearing apart at the roots, but the Fade has always been the province of spirits and not mortals, and by the time Fenris can look once more the chasm has closed, black shale pulled from nothing to close over the pits, edges seamed together like a surgeon's stitches. The demons wait no longer to resume their surge, a rolling wave as relentless as a tide.

For one terrible, still moment, he's pierced clean through by the eyes of a distant demon of pride half-crossed over the pit. Too _many _eyes, yellow and lidless, too much seen all at once: a startling, vivid memory of a dilapidated alienage shack and another demon hidden there, another offer, and a time when trust meant nothing behind the fear.

He knows his fears so well, now. Hawke has made his heart too strong to break that way again.

"There!" the Inquisitor shouts, and Fenris wrenches his head away from the yellow stare at last. An iron band around his chest gives way, then shatters as he drags down breath after breath; Trevelyan lifts her fisted, glowing hand, stumbling to a halt, and when she thrusts her fist to the almost-sky the endless murk of the Fade blasts away from her in every direction. Fenris's eyes sting, grit and grief-salt blurring all the world to smears, and he can't—where _is _it—

And then he sees at last the tall silver spearing of the eluvian that brought them here, unchanged since last they left it in this small stone-circled clearing, its mirrored surface reflecting a world they cannot see.

Merrill does not stop, a grass-toned dart as she races to the mirror's frame and slams her palms against its sides. Her mouth moves with words he cannot hear, gold tendrils of magic lifting vine-like from her knuckles, her forearms, draping themselves over the mirror's framing until the metal gleams with raw light.

A touch on his arm as they wait, embroidered half-gloves—Dorian, chest heaving, his fingers dropping to Hawke's forehead, his black-lined eyes falling shut. A purple seam of light across her forehead, a quick nod from Dorian, and Fenris tightens his grip on Hawke's waist, her knees. Precious minutes. Such precious seconds, every one, as Merrill sweats and fights the mirror and the demons race to meet them—

He gulps for air. He can't focus. Hawke's face is too pale, her eyelashes black and stuck to her broken cheeks; the Inquisitor stands at Merrill's back, one hand on her spine and the anchor reached over her shoulder towards the silvered glass; Merrill herself splays her palms against the eluvian's frame, her head hung low, one foot braced hard behind her as if the mirror weighs the world.

Sparks bloom into fire. At the places where Merrill touches metal, yes—and behind, too, where the thousand yards has collapsed into less than half that so that the ever-present fog around his ankles grows choked with greasy smoke. The rage demons throw orange light through the Fade's fog in sharp streaks, unnatural reflections flung through stone and mist and the curves of Desire's shoulders. More white-gold flashes come from where Merrill and the Inquisitor work, cleaner and briefer; Fenris blinks, again and again, until the afterimages disappear and he can see in the nearing throng the curved twinned horns of Pride piercing skyward through the smoke. How many pairs tower there above the rest? Four? Five? And all with yellow eyes…

His throat is raw. "They are too many. Too close."

"A few minutes more." Dorian's words are a soft echo, almost whipped away by the sudden bellow of a dozen hunger demons at once. The curls of his mustache turn up in a sudden smile too glad for this false world; he strides away from them all, facing back the way they've come, and pulls his staff from his shoulders in one smooth flourish. "And quickly, if you please!"

Abruptly Fenris cannot speak, caught driftspar in the tide of rage and grief and the agony of joy at Hawke's living once more, the madness of a magister's back between Hawke and the death that follows, the wild impossibility of his own slave's feet profaning the Maker's holiest ground. Hawke breathes in his arms, her head turning once against his chest as he swallows down ash-thick air—Hawke breathes—

Hawke breathes.

"No," Fenris says at last, hoarse as ash, and shifts Hawke's effortless weight to one arm. Two long paces—three, the Fade-stone growing hot beneath his feet—and his free hand clenches hard into the embroidered copper of Dorian's cloak. "Enough!" he shouts, this time to be heard over the soughing rush of magic at the mirror, the rising cry of demon and fire. Dorian staggers, wild-eyed and staring back over his shoulder, and now Fenris can see the fear hidden behind the set of his jaw. "Dorian Pavus! We must go now!"

"Someone must make sure you get away! They're too close—I'll give you the time!"

"You will _not!_" Fenris snarls, and when Merrill's voice rises to a chest-breaking scream behind him he shifts his grip to the cloak's collar, and he _pulls_.

Only flashes, then, the mirror's magic as wild as lightning and brighter still, the vine-gold tendrils Merrill has woven to its frame rippling with power. Trevelyan's hand pulses in time, green light growing steadily as she grips her own wrist and forces it towards the mirror's surface over Merrill's shoulder. "Dorian!" she cries through gritted teeth, and shoves closer—closer—so close the air shrieks at the sawing edges of two forces never meant to close their distance. The Fade seethes at their backs in an instant's pause, only an instant, but enough, _enough—_ "Fenris, Merrill! Go! _Now!_"

And she slams her hand against the eluvian's face.

White light explodes outwards from her fingers. Hotter than the first opening, though there's no time left for fear; Fenris pelts forward, Hawke in one arm and Dorian's cloak tangled around the other, Dorian cursing madly, and somewhere in the last steps Merrill stumbles forward too, and Trevelyan shouts behind them all, wordless and thundering too long—

—

There is nothing.

Nothing in the path between, just as before. No earth beneath his feet, no sound, no sight but the grey emptiness of the endless void. Nothing in his arms, though he can feel his elbows still bent, his fingers still crooked around the shape of Dorian's embroidered cloak. No weight. No Hawke. Nothing at all.

Nothing.

Every nerve scrapes raw to bleeding—every muscle in his jaw clenches whipcord against the bitterest grief he has ever felt.

He should have _known._

How many times? How many times in the last four months has he dreamed this very thing, Hawke found at last, Hawke living, Hawke _safe _in his arms—only to wake and find the dream slipped away with the misty dawn? How many times—sensing his own unwilling rise from sleep, clinging desperately to the last few minutes where he might still measure the warm weight of her arm over his waist, where he might still feel the texture of her skin against his fingertips.

One more dream. Only one more dream…

His feet slam into stone. _Hard _stone, the faces worked and polished smooth, and then the rain-grey sky comes so brilliant and blinding he must throw up his hand against it. Only he cannot, because in his arms—

Fenris knows he breathes too fast. The lyrium down his throat flares with every gasp, too fast, too bright, rippling when he tries and fails to speak. Somewhere the mirror flashes again, and again, and again, and at last goes dim and silent. Somewhere voices rouse across the gardens and at his side, his back, hands dropping lightly on his shoulders only to dance away again; somewhere a staff rattles to the ground and rolls away, forgotten. It doesn't matter, inconsequential as the dawn rain that drums past the open archways where the eluvian stands in its stone tower. How light she has become. How light, even here in this world where Fenris stands wide awake at last, where there is no dreaming left.

Hawke's fingers lift, slowly, then curl against her own throat. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, and when Fenris gives one great staggering step her head tilts back against his shoulder where his armor is not so thick.

_Hawke is alive. _


	2. Chapter 2

**Recommended listening: **nyepi, string version, by Olafur Arnalds (watch?v=jBBpsJ_9pqk)

* * *

"A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted."  
—_Our Mutual Friend_, Charles Dickens

—

"—isn't much time, not with the starving for who knows _how _long on top of it—"

Dorian's voice. Peeved, too loud, too close; Priory shakes her head sharply until the ringing clears and her vision clears with it. Slowly the courtyard resolves itself = again, this corner barbican where the eluvian has lived since Morrigan brought it to her, the stone corridor with its peaked arches through the open doors, the familiar gardens placed once more in their orderly rows just beyond. A steady rain dances down the leaves of the elfroot shrubs, shivers the prophet's laurel where it blooms on its trellis.

Home.

"—are you even _listening_ to me?"

"Dorian," she says, because Hawke is alive and Hawke is _here_, and there is still work yet to be done for what Priory's brought down upon the Champion. She yanks the staff from her back and jams it into a corner; it's heavier than it looks, and her balance is thrown off enough already. "What do you need? What does she need?"

Fenris has not fallen, but it's a near thing. He leans hard against the wall, his face bloodless, locked to Hawke still silent and unmoving in his arms. He does not move at Priory's approach; nor does he seem aware of Dorian at his elbow trying desperately to herd him towards the door, or the flutter of dim green light as Merrill touches her fingertips to Hawke's temples and closes her eyes.

There's nothing left on the Champion's bones. No more fat, no muscle; she's skull and skin and madness in her eyes, demon-scars dotted down her throat, broken legs like the stick dolls her brothers once made for her long ago. Priory could weep, and indeed there's an instant where the burning behind her eyes nearly presses through, but she can't bear such selfishness here.

Dorian's fretting has reached a fever pitch. "The surgery. Was it set up as promised? We need—did Dagna—"

"We'll find out together," she says, and lays her hand on Fenris's shoulder. He does not move. "Fenris, I'm sorry, but we need to take Hawke to the healers. Can you hear me?"

No answer. Priory ducks her head, glancing under the white fall of his hair, and her throat closes, because from this little distance she can see what she could not before. His eyes are damp, bright and unblinking as he stares at Hawke's white face, and in her sudden silence he…hears her, somehow, and turns his head as if he is made of stone.

"Fenris," she repeats, her voice gone thick. "Please. Hawke needs your help."

He swallows. Nods, too, and takes a breath, and after a few blinks his face grows clearer. "Of course," he says, straightening from the wall, squaring his shoulders so that Hawke fits better against him. "Of course. Show me the way."

"Inquisitor!"

_Cullen. _Cullen in the open doors, one arm braced against the frame, one of the lieutenants she does not know beside him, a half-dozen onlookers behind. He looks thunderous, though the instant he sees what Fenris carries the expression vanishes behind white shock. "Is that—have you—"

"We must get to the Undercroft," Priory says sharply. No room for argument. No _time, _and Cullen straightens at her tone, already turning with a shout to clear the path. The lieutenant follows his lead, jogging ahead with bellows as likely to gather attention as dissuade it, but so long as they are not hindered Priory no longer cares.

Merrill catches her sleeve. "I should stay with the eluvian," she tells her, though her lips are trembling. "For a few minutes more, at least. There are some paths I must make sure are closed."

Priory nods. "Come as soon as you can."

"I will," says Merrill, stronger, a green branch made better for the bending than the break, and turns back to the way they came.

—

They clear the courtyard and its steady rain in moments, the great hall in a handful more. At this hour, so close to dawn, few people are there aside from a scattering of maids and Vivienne overlooking the balcony above, her gasp carrying through the quiet air; still, Priory knows it will be only a matter of time before the word spreads like cancer and the hall fills with too many eyes and ears, all watching, all waiting, all whispering. A hundred steps—an _eternity, _and at last Cullen throws open the door to the Undercroft.

"There," she says, stepping aside so that Dorian and Fenris may hurry through unhindered, and places a hand on Cullen's arm. "Clear the hall. I don't care how long it takes."

"The clearing, or…?" He glances over his shoulder to the door at the bottom of the stairs, already shut tight as a tomb.

"Either." She closes her eyes, fighting back a shudder. "If she comes out alive, it'll be a near thing, and not one word of it should spread anywhere it shouldn't. If she doesn't—if—well."

If she doesn't, no one should walk with her to the pyre but those who've loved her. If she doesn't, the grief in that room should belong to no one but them.

And Priory will…

Warm hands on her cheeks make her open her eyes, look up to Cullen again; he's leaned in close, his brow furrowed as he searches her face. "This was not your fault," he says, each word slow and clear. "Do you understand?"

"You didn't hear what she—" she bites out, too loud. Deep breaths, and again; no need to give the goggling onlookers still clustered throughout the hall even more fodder. Her mouth twists. "She's gone mad, Cullen."

He grimaces; his thumb slides over her cheekbone. "And Fenris? The blood mage—Merrill? I saw them with you at that mirror."

"How did you know—oh. Of course. I'm sorry; I forget sometimes, that you knew them before."

"Some better than others. The Champion kept her most objectionable friends as far from the Gallows as she could, and Merrill has stayed in the gardens here since she arrived."

"I'm sorry," she says again, and means it. "You know how I feel about maleficar. But she knew more about the eluvian's working than even Morrigan for what we needed, and she knew how to open the path."

He shakes his head. "Another time. Where is she now?"

"She's finishing something with the eluvian. You must let her through when she comes. Tell Varric—no, he won't be back for a week yet at least. And Fenris is…" Her throat knots again, sudden and startling, and this time she can't stop the damned tears from welling up. "Cullen, I don't know what he's going to do. If she lives and she's gone mad, he'll—he'll live with that forever. If she dies down there, he'll live with _that_, and I—"

She'd thought Fenris had been mistaken. A spider-strung cadaver in rotten fur and broken steel he'd clutched to his chest, more bone than flesh, lank black hair hanging in clumps to its shoulders. Only another mocking memory of the Fade, surely, but then it had breathed_, _and spoken, and…

His grief and hope together had been palpable, _terrible_, a living thing that might have reshaped the Fade around them had he been born with more magic in his blood. His hands had been trembling, and the lyrium brands had thrown little traces of light up and down his arms, and for all the flat stoicism he had shown ever since Hawke had died she'd realized for the first time how keenly he loved her after all, like an ancient river where the water flows quickest at the narrow place, surface smooth as glass to hide the torrent underneath.

Oh, how he loves the Champion. Is in love with her too, certainly, but she knows now how he _loves_ her, sure as the north star rises.

"Come now," Cullen murmurs, and Priory realizes she is crying, has been, and the heel of his hand swipes gently over her stained cheek. "The Champion's made of stern stuff. She'll pull through yet."

"How can you know?"

"I've seen her take on the Qunari Arishok in single combat, and she lived through that. I was there with her at the last battle of Kirkwall when the Knight-Captain brought all the statues of the city to life to fight against us, and Hawke lived through that too." He smiles at a sudden thought, shakes his head, and leans forward until their foreheads touch. "If she lives, even if she has gone mad, Fenris will be glad for it."

She clenches her jaw. "How can you _know_?"

"I would, if it were you."

Her stomach jolts, but there's nothing but honesty in his amber eyes. The rain outside keeps the stained glass dim, but even so, fractures of blue and scarlet and gold manage to dapple down his shoulders. "Oh," she says intelligently, but manages to recover herself well enough to add, "I would rather not go mad."

His scarred lip hooks up into a crooked smile before he moves to kiss her forehead. "I agree," he says quietly, and lets her go. "I'll keep the hall clear."

"Thank you." She straightens, tugging one of her leather gloves into place again, and scrubs her face clean. "Thank you, Commander."

"Inquisitor."

She returns his half-bow, her heart lighter than it ought to be, and turns and walks into the Undercroft.

—

No one notices her quiet entrance as she shuts the door, and for a long time Priory leans back against its smooth cool surface and says nothing. It had been Dorian's suggestion, of all people, to convert the Undercroft into a temporary healers' space; even if, by some miracle, they had found her alive, none of them had wanted to take her to the general infirmary for any care she might need. Somewhere else, then, somewhere private and isolated with limited access and fresh running water, where a surgeon's table might fit with room to spare for a fat coal brazier. Dagna had agreed immediately, and if Harritt had grumbled he'd still taken his tools to Blackwall's stable readily enough.

She can't even see Hawke.

Dorian stands at the table's head, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his palms upturned and sparking purple, his eyes half-closed in concentration. Another five or six healers from the infirmary gather close around, their hair covered in tight white wimples and caps, all of them busy reaching for this set of cloths or cutting away this rusted armor or running clean water over skin so filthy the runoff stains the floor. There's less conversation than she'd expected, though perhaps it's for the best.

She nearly falls when the door abruptly pulls open behind her. A slender hand on her back keeps her upright, and Priory straightens to see Vivienne, dressed in a simple high-collared black robe, a heavy clinking bag in her hands and her dark eyes serious. She glances once at the table beyond, at the figure atop it, then back at Priory without a word.

"Vivienne," Priory says, apology and request in one.

She smiles, gently, and lifts her chin. "I think you'd better let me through, my dear," she says, and even as Priory nods she's striding past, drawing out a blue-glinting bottle from the bag that she drops directly into Dorian's upturned hand. He doesn't flinch, downing the lyrium immediately; Vivienne thrusts her bag at one of the silent assistants in the corner and moves to the table's foot, curling her dark fingers over Hawke's twisted ankles without an apparent thought for the grime. Another spark, a flash of white, and then a steady blue-green glow to match the strength of Dorian's own.

The room hums with magic. Priory pulls the door to the great hall shut again, scraping her fingers through her cropped hair; the rain still falls in constant sheets, a steady grey-shimmer veil over the far wall where the Undercroft opens to mountain sky. It's cold, though not cold enough to stoke the forge; besides, she knows nothing of their healing and its needs. Perhaps it _should_ be cold, even if the ebb and swell of Dorian's healing makes her teeth buzz.

There's no motion, but something makes her look to her left—and _there _is Fenris, ramrod straight against the wall, feet planted, arms crossed tight over his chest. He still wears his armor; his sword is still strapped to his back. He might have rooted there a thousand years ago save the burning in his eyes.

She comes to stand beside him. The stone's cold enough to chill through two layers of leather and padding when she leans back against it; the wind gusts outside so that the rain-sheets billow like a sail, but nothing breaks past the heavy overhang but a sigh or two of cooler air.

They stand like this for a long time. Dorian says a word and two of the healers respond with alacrity, one darting over to another table with a fine array of terrifying silver tools; Vivienne lifts a hand without looking and receives splints, poultices, small vials of shock-blue lyrium. One of the assistants at the side of the room tends a cart with a dozen open-topped pots atop it, various pastes and creams stinking of royal elfroot, embrium, and dawn lotus. Another keeps a kettle hot at the forge, adding sprigs of spindleweed and the white-tipped leaves of arbor blessing every few minutes as it steeps.

It's an aggressively medicinal smell all told, and after some time Priory realizes the hand with the Anchor aches badly. Overdone it again. Not that surprising, given the veritable army of demons come chasing after them so recently, but another reminder of her remarkable inability to foresee the consequences of her actions. At least it's the only price this time, she thinks ruefully, and rubs her right thumb hard into her marked palm until the throbbing eases. Well—her hand, and Hawke's sanity.

"It hurts you?"

She jumps. Fenris's voice hadn't been loud—a rumble more than anything—but she'd expected it as much as the mountain dropping out from under them. He's looking at her now out of the corners of very green eyes, and though every line of him is still brittle as bone he seems ready enough to listen.

"Sometimes," she admits. "If I strain it. A little here and there's not so bad."

"Hm." His eyes slide back to Hawke. "I understand."

She would like to apologize, but it seems as useless now as when he'd first come through the doors of the great hall two months ago, dark cloak slung clear of the hilt of his sword, his long white hair in a careless braid that did nothing to soften the cold fury in his eyes. He had been ready to kill her where she'd stood beside Varric, she'd thought—and perhaps there had been a small shard inside her reveling in the reprisal at last—but he'd come with a story of impossible dreams instead, visions where Hawke lived still in the Fade against all odds, and a plan, and a request for her aid.

Find the blood mage named Merrill who knew more of eluvians than any mage living. Find a way to keep a path in the Fade from vanishing, a door open long enough to pass back through. Find a way to bring the dead to life again.

Andraste keep her, but when he'd spoken, she'd begun to think it possible_._

"You should know that I am grateful," Fenris says as Vivienne makes some sharp gesture that reflects green light across the cave's entire ceiling. One of the healers scoops up the pile of ruined, bloody leather and armor and removes it to the side of the room; Fenris jerks, an arrested motion, when the man gestures at the fire, but another assistant shakes her head and the bundle is placed in a neat stack on a side table instead. Fenris hisses out a breath through his teeth, then adds, "You did not have to do so much for no reward."

"_Oh_," she manages, her left fist clenching around its dim persistent glow. She presses it to her stomach. "I did, trust me."

"You did not force her to stay behind."

"I gave her no choice, either." Oh, _stop_. She has no right to say this, not to him of all people— "After all the time I'd spent telling her how badly we needed the Wardens, I should never have given her the chance. I might as well have turned the blade myself."

A long silence, then a soft huff that surprises her—and Fenris is _smiling_, one corner of his mouth turned up for the first time she can remember. He looks at her, those green eyes formidable in direct gaze, and says, "Hawke chose."

"When I took all other options from her."

"I have seen her turn impossible defeats to victory with nothing but her staff. I have seen her change the course of men's lives with a word." The smile grows larger, more tender. Her heart _hurts_. "I have seen her fail at those things, too. She has never taken a step back when she could run forward, and she has never been able to bear the thought of staying safe when one died in her place. Inquisitor," he says again, "Hawke _chose_."

Damn these tears. Damn them, and damn her. "Fenris, what if…?"

His gaze is forward again, watching without blinking for the breaks here and there where Hawke's white, bloodless face glances into view. Her eyes are closed tight, her mouth slack; whatever Merrill had done before must have faded, because even from here Priory knows the look of Dorian's sleeping tonics. "Hm?"

"What if her mind…?"

"Nothing can keep me from her side."

So easy. Smooth as a river over the cliff's edge, effortless, inevitable. He might have commented on the rain save the telltale flash of lyrium down his throat.

Priory leans her head back against the wall, grateful now for the coolness that seeps through her hair, down the nape of her flushed neck. "Whatever the Inquisition can provide you, consider it yours. Rooms, healers, poultices…whatever you need, even if it's something we must send for. As long as you want it, we will have a home for you here."

He nods, though his smile grows wistful. Another home, perhaps, another place that belongs to them alone; she doesn't ask, and instead shifts her weight away from her aching hip. She adds instead, "Dorian and Vivienne are two of the most talented mages I know. If they can save her, they will. Unless there's someone else I ought to send scouts to find?"

Fenris shakes his head. "I knew a healer, once. Very powerful. Very dangerous." His voice trails off; his jaw tightens. "We parted on poor terms. Hawke sent him away; I have not spoken to him in years. She writes to him sometimes, I believe, but he remains in hiding, and any soldier sent to seek him out would just as likely be returned as ashes."

"All right," she says softly. So much more there than she dares to touch. "We'll wait, then."

He closes his eyes. "Just so."

—

They wait. The bloody bowls of water are changed, bloodied, changed again; the pile of clean bandages dwindles to nothing and is refreshed. Merrill comes, and waits with them, and leaves once more when she cannot stop her tears. Priory goes and brings two chairs when her knees begin to protest too loudly; Fenris removes his sword at last, and his gauntlets if not the rest of his armor, and folds one leg over the other as they settle in. The rain slackens, stops, comes again in fits and starts throughout the afternoon. Somewhere near sunset the clouds begin to break at last, and around the emerging mountaintops in the distance settle fine wreaths of mist, lit here and there in crowning gold as the first thin slants of evening sunlight begin to shaft through.

The pace slows. The healers move less urgently; Vivienne's commands are not as sharp. Dorian pauses now, looking over each stitch and spell with a critical eye before moving to the next. Neither Fenris nor Priory speak; the shift's obvious enough she will not tempt death by voicing it aloud.

Hawke still breathes.

Her hair has been cut shorter, trimmed back where the blood matted too thick to be washed clean; her broken cheek has been remade, though the bruises linger deep purple and green down the side of her face and throat. One arm has been bandaged and splinted thumb to elbow where small fractures run the length of it, and though Priory understands very little of what Vivienne has said she gathers the bleeding deep inside has been mended too. And her legs…

Straight again, straight as they can be, though stern wood rods cage both legs to the knee and metal pins encircle her left ankle. Linen bandages soaked in a tincture of embrium wrap tightly around both legs up to mid-thigh; there other places too, dressings over old cuts and older bruises, tiny strips over her ears, the bridge of her nose, where so much elfroot paste has been applied her skin is hidden behind it. But she breathes, she breathes…

"There," says Vivienne at last, low, exhausted, though her back stays arrow-straight as she steps from the foot of the table. The collar of her dress has grimed with sweat. "All to be done for now, my dear."

An unspoken signal, and the healers from the infirmary begin to withdraw, gathering the used rags and empty jars, the soiled tools and clamps in need of firing. Priory thanks them as they pass, the words heavy on her tongue—how can that alone suffice for what they've done here?—but their tired eyes and tired smiles show nothing but understanding, and soon enough there's no one but the infirmary's director smoothing a thin white shift over Hawke's chest and stomach, Vivienne washing her hands, Dorian at Hawke's head with his fingers to her temples, and—

Fenris's shoulders are high as a cat's, the lines of his jaw rigid beneath the lyrium. He crosses to the table's edge with stiff steps—more, Priory thinks, due to sitting for hours than any outright fear—but Dorian gives him a weary nod before shutting his eyes. A faint purple light pulses from his fingers, dances over Hawke's closed eyelids, and wisps into nothing.

"There," he says, ragged as a scarecrow, and reaches for the table with locked elbows. His mustache droops at both ends. Priory starts to drag him one of the chairs, but he waves her off. "There," he repeats, looking at Fenris this time. "Finished, at least for now. She'll sleep until the morning, and we'll know then where we are."

Fenris gives a hard swallow and lifts one bare, lyrium-marked hand. An instant's hesitation, no more; then it settles on Hawke's cheek, tentative and gentle, and draws up its line to the black fall of her hair from her temple. Bloodless now, and clean, though strong with the smell of rough soaps. Oh, but his face—

"She will live?" Fenris asks, hoarse, and there is a hope in the question that could lift the sky.

"Yes," says Dorian, and at Vivienne's gesture from the fire, adds, "I'm nearly sure."

"How sure?"

"There is only so much magic can do for things like this. She has lived through the worst, but—" he shrugs, goes to wipe his face with a stained hand and thinks better of it. "At some point her heart must beat on its own. We have set her as far on the path as we can, but she must have enough strength to take the next steps by herself."

Fenris—smiles. Again, true, and when he lifts his head the setting sun dances down upon all three of them through the Undercroft's cavern mouth, burning away the little mists that have gathered at the base of the waterfalls nearest them, catching like fire on the copper thread in Dorian's collar, the curve of Hawke's cheek, the lines of lyrium in Fenris's hands. It has no right to be so warm this high in the mountain peaks; the stone-chill is a distant memory in her skin, even with the snowcaps not an arm's reach away. She could swim in this gold, if she tried...

"I told Hawke once that she would lead me to strange places," Fenris says, almost to himself, and Priory sees Vivienne's face change suddenly, proud, glad. "This will not be the end of them."

And somehow, against everything that might yet fail, she believes him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Recommended listening:** The Final Chapter, by Olafur Arnalds (watch?v=rUL04sHIVhI).

* * *

Daybreak. The low hills shine  
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.  
I know what I see; sun that could be  
the August sun, returning  
everything that was taken away —

It does me no good; violence has changed me.  
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;  
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,  
with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;  
bounty, balm after violence.  
Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields  
have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,  
I won't believe you.  
Tell me I'm living,  
I won't believe you.  
—_October_, Louise Glück

—

_Magic will serve that which is best in me. My magic will serve that which is best in me. Magic—my magic will serve—_

Her head hurts. Her knees, too, and her ankles and both feet like they haven't in—days—years—_my magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base. _Oh, her head _hurts_.

All things told, Hawke would rather not open her eyes. The last time she'd hurt this badly it had been a surprisingly sophisticated scene with a batch of templars overrunning the house in Lothering. Carver had been dead on the floor, bleeding from his throat in a red seam; Bethany had been on her knees before a templar in full plate and steel mask, the blade of a silver sword sawing back and forth under her right ear. The bribe had been transparent enough for how thin the world had been made, safety only with her soul's surrender, but the pain had kept her distracted so long she hadn't realized where she really was for nearly a week. A day—no, a week, surely, as suns had set and nights had come while the templars took over her home. Too long. They are smarter now. So is she—but more tired, too.

Still. She knows her own name at the moment. Improvement, at least, from the last, and after a minute or two more of internal war, she allows her eyes to open again.

Indoors. Carved, painted ceilings, blurry frescoes of scenes she doesn't know. Dim daylight made dimmer by heavy brocade curtains pulled shut and tied with yellow cord. A bed with four white posts and a jade green duvet, soft under her fingers and reeking of money. Only one flat white pillow beneath her head, though, pale cornflowers stitched along one hem, and no others in sight. Likely enough they have confused her memory of her mother's Amell estate with the little bed from Lothering. Not the first time.

Not that which is most base. Do not forget. You can't forget.

Her head hurts badly enough she'd like to cry, as if she still might have tears left after all this time. Instead she clears her throat, a vain attempt to distract herself from the pain by focusing on the desperate thirst, and coughs experimentally.

She's rewarded with a streak of pain down her throat and a lurch of motion to her immediate left. The instinct to reach for her father's staff she's long since smothered, lost when the fight with Nightmare ended in explosions and fire, and instead she idly watches a decent shaping of Fenris jerk himself out of a heavy sleep in a walnut armchair pulled to the bedside.

The skin's darker than it should be by a few shades. The lyrium's paler too, and his ears a touch too long, and old habit runs her eyes over the rest of him, immediately picking out each flaw in the demon's cast. They've gone with the longer hair again, a loose braid falling over one shoulder to his collarbones. She doesn't know the clothes, though it's not the first time they've tried such an invention; a dark-dyed tunic somewhere between blue and black, not quite as long as his old one, with asymmetric toggles up to his right shoulder. A wide collar, hemmed in grey thread; long, loose sleeves that gather in tight cuffs at his wrists. A broad woven black sash knotted around his waist over brown leggings, narrow earth-brown boots that reach his knees. She nearly laughs at those, though she prefers not to give them the _immediate _solution to their failures if she can help it.

"But the eyes are _very _good," Hawke says aloud, the inside of her throat like sandpaper, and doesn't hide the bitterness.

She hates it when they get the eyes right. Might as well strip off every bit of armor she has and start her naked; it always takes so _long_ to build up her defenses again, and she's disoriented enough now she can't trust the pain to keep her grounded.

"_Hawke_," the shade says, and damn her if the voice isn't bad either, though she's never heard Fenris quite so wondering before, "you're awake."

Her lip curls. "So are you, but you don't see me making a fuss about it."

Flames, but she's gone hoarse. Not that surprising given how long she's been without food or water—or mortal company—but still, it's a bad impression on a good demon, and she's acutely aware of the imbalance.

"Wait—here—" and he is _trembling_, his hands shockingly unsteady as he reaches for a tall clay pitcher and a metal cup. His dark eyebrows are drawn together, furrowed in some expression she can't pick out; his nose is only slightly off the right aquiline shape, though the lips aren't quite proud enough. Still, it's a better approximation than most, and the expression shifts fluidly from agitation to concern as he brings the cup of water to her bedside, and when she cannot lift her arms to take it, to her mouth. Certainly better than the first time they'd tried to make Aveline, who'd ended up with her face stuck in benign puzzlement while an entire cave collapsed around her.

It's a copper cup, little beaten flowers around its rim. She doesn't know why that amuses her so much as she takes the rim in her teeth and slings the whole cup as far from her as she can.

"_Hawke_," Fenris says, shocked.

Fuck, her mouth burns. Even that little moisture on her lips is enough to make her weepy, but she hasn't lived this long by giving it up to every demon with a bit of water in a desert. "I know I don't make much of an impression at the moment, serah, but I _am _Fereldan. You'll have to do better than that."

He kneels and picks up the cup from the stain it's left on the white-and-gold rug, refills it to the brim from the pitcher, then brings it to her bedside again. "It is only water," he says slowly, and takes a sip to show her. "Nothing more."

Maker, she _knows_. She waits, tolerant, for the rest; when he still says nothing, she adds, as patiently as he had, "And its price is…?"

Now his brows pinch tight, and he moves a step or two closer. "There is no price. You need water—and food—and they have been brought for you. _No price_," he says again, and when she narrows her eyes he only slides one hand behind her head and lifts her from the pillow, just enough that the cup of water does not spill as it tilts. "I swear to you, Hawke, you will be safe if you drink this."

Better promises than some have made her. Besides, her head is splitting and the strain of thirst makes it worse, and when Fenris tilts the cup again she drinks, and drinks, and drinks, until the thing is empty. The favor too, of course, scarlet at his right wrist, and the faded crest at his hip. Those details they never forget.

"Do you want more?"

"And if I do?" She knows she's too defensive, but they'd nearly taken her that way in the earliest days of her incarceration. _Would you like to see a little more? I'll take you, if you come with me now. _An outstretched hand, the promise implicit in its offering, and not until she'd felt the whispering rumble of power in his fingertips had she realized the deal she'd nearly struck.

"Then it's yours."

If there's a trap, she cannot see it. She empties the cup thrice more, watching this shade with Fenris's face carry it back and forth without complaint. He sets it aside after the last, when even Hawke can admit another glass would do more harm than good, and sits again in the walnut chair. Her thirst is hardly slaked after all this time, but…bearable now, and the headache marginally eased, and now she can better inventory the rest of the shape they've given her for this particular dream.

Splints and bandages, as it happens. Both legs immobilized past the knee, rods locking them in place and catching splinters in the fine green duvet she lies upon. An undyed linen shift covers her from hip to throat with more bandages beneath; she can feel the stiffness, and she knows the lumpy look of dressings too well. One arm has been bound to her own chest, wrapped in heavy canvas and slung so tight she cannot move it. The other's well enough, but thin—when had she grown so thin?—and so weak it's more trouble than she can bear to lift it.

"Clever," she says at last, and drops her head again to the pillow. "I suppose they told you of the time I tried to walk down the Grand Way because they forgot to tell my dreams I couldn't stand? Nearly snapped my thigh right in half."

"Hawke," the thing says, low and careful. "Do you know who I am?"

"Desire, I'd wager—easy enough to guess with the soft bed and fancy curtains. Outside odds on sloth, though few enough of those care for the details of my lover's face the way you have." She pauses thoughtfully. "I suppose it might be a long play for rage, if it's the cold anger sort. But there's not been near enough humiliation for pride yet, and terror always starts with nightmares in the dark. No, it must be Desire. Tell me, what are you called? You always have such lovely names."

His hands have clenched around each other at his knees, the knuckles white, the lyrium sparking. He's even bothered to scrape a few of them, just for the realism. "I am no demon, Hawke. I swear it."

"Of course."

"We came for you. Do you remember? I came into the Fade, with Dorian Pavus and Merrill and the Inquisitor."

"Which time?" she asks, genuinely confused. How many hundreds of times has Fenris brought her out from the Fade by now; how many rifts have they vaulted through the instant before their closing? "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be flippant. They've just all run together. You must know how it goes."

Every word sounds like a thorned vine dragged from his throat. "You have seen this often?"

"Oh, _yes_. Well, not this particular room, I mean—" she makes a vague gesture with her good hand, which is mostly a wriggle of two fingers, "—but there's always some sort of gentle recuperation before everything falls apart and you tear my ribs out one by one or Danarius burns you alive where you stand, or however you've chosen to end it. Sometimes it can run on quite a while if I'm too fool to understand what's happened. One time I sailed round the coast of Amaranthine with Isabela for three weeks before I realized she had no eyes."

"No eyes."

"Mm. Just black voids in her face where eyes should have been. Shame on me for not noticing earlier, really."

"What…happened then?"

"She asked for mine," Hawke says, rolling her head on the pillow until she can face him properly. "Put her thumbs here, and here on my cheeks—" and _oh_, there is nothing left to her—even this little reach takes all the strength she has, and when her trembling fingertips brush over her cheeks there's no give left, nails scraping over skull-tight skin, "—and said she knew she could get me back to Kirkwall if I could lend her the sight, just for a little while."

His jaw is so tight she can hear it creak. "You did not _accept _this, Hawke."

"Of course not. I told her I had a pair of sovereigns she could use instead, since they'd at least match the old color properly. So she and her crew scorched off my hair and quartered me on the deck."

"_Hawke_," he breathes, aghast.

"Not the real me," she snaps, impatient at what's quickly becoming a farce. "The dream only lasts until I die or I break the world. Then I wake up, and we're all right back where we started, one enormous unhappy family."

He reaches for her, wincing, but she recoils sharp enough to startle them both.

"_Don't touch me!"_

He stops dead, eyes wide, but she _means _it, as much as she's ever meant anything, and she won't have this thing in Fenris's face touching her an instant more than necessary. Most of them will listen, at least in these early stages when they're trying to buy her trust. She can only hope he'll do the same.

His hand falls between them, and he sits forward, his mouth opening, but a knock on the half-open door interrupts him. Dorian enters, trim high-collared black robes loud in the pale room, and is followed by a woman in her fifties dressed in the red and white colors of the Inquisition infirmary. Her curled, greying hair has been cropped to her chin, and she holds a small tray of covered pots and bowls that reeks of dawn lotus.

"Dorian," says the almost-Fenris, and he pushes to his feet. "I was about to send for you."

"I felt the sleeping spell lift. Helista offered to assist." Dorian circles the foot of the bed to approach her other side, and Hawke automatically runs through the same catalogue: mustache too large above the smirk, the jaw misshaped, the eyes the wrong shade of hazel. She's also fairly certain the beauty mark is meant to be on the _other _cheek, though she can admit that memory is faded. "Good morning, my lovely Champion. How are we feeling?"

She laughs. Louder than she means to, loud enough her aching head doubles down to split her in half. But oh, the _irony_— "It's a wonderful try," she says instead, blinking away the tears, ignoring the pained flinch Fenris gives at every snicker. "Really. But I'll tell you what I've told everyone else a thousand times: there's nothing for you here. Best move along to someone less stubborn."

Dorian's smile slides away. He gives a meaningful glance to Fenris, who only shakes his head; at an ornate, overladen cart at the side of the room Helista begins to replace the empty jars with her own, throwing worried looks at the bed whenever she thinks Hawke will not notice.

"She believes—" starts Fenris, though it's as stilted as the old long stairway down to the docks in Kirkwall, where one never knew if the next step would hold or crumble away into the sea. "She believes she is still in the Fade. That she is dreaming, and this is all some demon's artifice to claim her soul."

Hawke laughs again, giddy and bright. "Oh, don't sell me so short. Is this Pride after all, coaxing me to sing my own praises?" She winks at Dorian, though it pulls at a terrible scrape at her hairline, and adds, "If nothing else, all these efforts have made me quite aware of my own worth. I am—forgive me—_extraordinarily _powerful, and exceptionally alive, and the efforts of some thousand demons has given me to understand that traipsing my very mortal body into the Fade and leaving it there for the taking has created something of a stir for you spirity types."

"I see."

"Not that it matters, because as I mentioned, I am also exceedingly mule-headed, but if it provides us both a few hours of entertainment before you pluck out my teeth or whatever it is you have in mind, it doesn't matter. This bed is very soft," she adds as an afterthought, and taps an irregular rhythm across its surface.

"If I gave you my word that this is not the Fade," Fenris says abruptly. He's come back to the walnut chair, gripping its back too tightly, his eyes—those _eyes_—boring into hers. "That you are alive, and that you have been brought to the waking world safely and that this is not a dream—would you believe me?"

She smiles.

His eyes close; he turns away. "What else, then?" he asks Dorian, voice stony.

"Allow me to check the bandages," Dorian offers, looking to Hawke as much for permission as explanation. "Even if you think this stay temporary, I'd not have you in unnecessary pain for the length of it."

"What will it cost me?"

"It will cost you nothing," Dorian says, confused, though Fenris's eyes grow dark.

"Check away," Hawke says lightly, and leans back on her pillow as he begins to change out sachets of valerian and elfroot, rewraps bandages soaked in distillation of embrium, pours her a cup of tea made with spindleweed and lotus and watches until she drains it dry. Helista brings her a tiny bowl of soft bread and crumbly white cheese; the taste is too mild for what she remembers, but she supposes demons aren't overly accustomed to mortal food and forgives them the error. Besides, she is hungry.

Flames and pyre, she is so hungry, so hungry. She could eat her own stomach—she is too near crying now, her eyes burning—she is _so hungry—_

"Here," says Fenris, voice low, and in his hand is another bowl, more bread, more cheese, a half-dozen blueberries tucked into the little space between them. "No price," he adds at her silent look, and as Dorian finishes the wrappings on her good wrist, Fenris sits in the walnut chair and feeds her from his own hands until the bowl is empty. His skin does not once touch hers. "There will be more later," he tells her, and if it is the promise of a demon it is enough that she believes him.

Dorian cuts the last tail with a neat _snip_ and stands, dropping the unused bandages and salves onto Helista's tray and dusting off his hands. "That will do nicely for now," he says, "though we'll have to have Vivienne look at your legs. She's much better than me at those fiddly little bones."

"If you insist."

"I do," he says. "And if you can bear it, I think you'd better sleep a bit more in the interim. You're still weak enough a kitten could sneeze and knock you over."

As if it _matters_. It's a pretty enough dream for all they've done to it, but she knows just as well as they do her real body lies somewhere on a Makerforsaken rock in the middle of the Fade, Nightmare's monstrous spider-corpse still clutching her tightly in its shadow, spider silk draped over every inch of her like a gossamer wedding gown. Somewhere her legs are still just as broken, her stomach still knocking just as empty. It's just a _dream, _and she's lost her patience.

"All right," Dorian says eventually, filling the awkward silence she has left them. "And Helista, will you have someone bring up a cot and some blankets? The Inquisitor asked, but I think Lieutenant Somal has forgotten."

Helista nods, a maternal smile, kinder than it ought to be for a demon's making. "Of course, lord."

And so Dorian goes, and Helista with him, and Fenris settles into the walnut chair again to wait. He does not speak; he only _looks _at her, eyes pinched, mouth tight, and rests his chin on his folded hands. Well, she won't make the effort of conversation if _he_ won't, especially since it's all of his invention, and instead she watches the water-stain on the rug seep into a broad uneven circle, and dry, and fade, until she falls asleep.

—

Hawke wakes up.

For a moment she can't place it—and then the murky, wet stone resolves itself under her fingers again, and when she turns her head she feels the telltale pricking pull of the spiderwebs that snare her hair to rock and bone. She looks down and yes, _there_ are her legs, broken akimbo as they should be, her mana parched dry, her belly aching with emptiness; yes, her armor as rusted and bloodied once more, her fingers tingling and numb where they stretch out behind her.

The best Fenris she's seen in a long time, she can admit now. She'd have liked to feel his hand on her hand, just as a reminder, even if it had only been a shadow of the real thing. Even without the calluses—somehow, it's one of those little details they can never seem to get right—he'd had enough of the proper lyrium feel to him that she thinks it might have been worth it. And his eyes…

"Stop it," she says aloud, horrified at herself.

_My magic will serve that which is best in me. _

As near as she's come yet to wanting what they've offered. Stop it. Stop it. There will never be a road home to Fenris, to the _real _Fenris, if she lets herself be taken now.

She knows he's waiting. Knows as sure as the shingles on the house they bought in Wilhaven, sure as the thyme and lemon balm she'd planted in the garden he'd helped her till. She'd promised him, sworn on her father's name that she'd be careful, the only reason he'd let her begin the trip alone. She'd left him standing in their doorway; a month, and then he'd join her, soon as the slavers south of Willard's Grove were wiped away by his hand. He is waiting for her somewhere in the other world, and if she can just get a moment or two she will break free of this place and go back to him. Somehow, somehow, she will find a way and she will _break this world apart—_

"Will you?" says Fenris.

Hawke yanks her head up, ignoring the screaming muscles in her neck and the webs that tear at her hair. There he stands, every part of him exactly as she remembers, his face right, his nose right, his mouth, his armor—but for some reason her heart drops like a stone in her chest. This is _right_, proclaims her memory, and her skin crawls—

"Will you?" he says again, his voice cold, his arms crossed. "You have lain here so long, Hawke. Six months? A year? How long will you let them chain you on your knees?"

"I will do it," she insists, feeble to her own ears. "I just need a little more time."

One corner of his mouth curves up, not nearly as warm as it should be. "I can give you a little more time."

"What?"

"I can give you more time," he repeats, and extends one gauntleted hand down to her where she kneels at his feet. "Will you take what I have to offer?"

No calluses. No scuffs on the silvered steel, no scars. Pristine and perfect and so, so _wrong._

"No," she breathes, and wrenches herself away.

"What?"

Hawke throws back her head as far it can go, and she screams into the green void of the sky—

—

_"No!"_

A white-blue flash of light in the corner—a heavy thud—a frescoed ceiling gone strange in the dim blue of twilight. White posts—four posts, for the bed on which she lies. A jade green duvet made colorless with dusk.

She's back. Back in the demon's dream, and Andraste's pyre burn her alive if she isn't glad for it.

"Lethallan," says a voice, soft, sweet, and Hawke jerks her head to the side to see Merrill, or a shaping of Merrill, kneeling at the side of the bed, the walnut chair abandoned behind her. She's in white and green, high-necked, bare-armed, and her eyes are so wide in the dimness they nearly glow. "Lethallan, what happened? Was it a very bad dream?"

The wrong green, she tells herself. The fingers the wrong shape where they rest gently on her shoulder. No staff to reach for. Stop trying. "Where…"

"You are still with the Inquisition, my dear," says another voice, a new voice, from the foot of her bed, and abruptly Hawke realizes Vivienne de Fer stands there—has been standing there the whole time, her hands gleaming with magic and tracing sigils in the air over her legs. Vivienne gives a thin smile, and adds, "Whether you wish to believe it or not."

"It's all right," Merrill murmurs, and then she turns over her shoulder to say it again to Fenris where he sits on the side of the cot that has been laid out for him along one wall. His eyes are bleary with too little sleep; his markings still pulse faintly with every heartbeat, throwing gentle reflections off the mirror-polished dresser beside him. A beautiful crimson blanket with embroidered gold feathers has tangled around his waist. "I think it was only a dream. It's all right."

"Only a dream," Hawke echoes balefully, and shuts her eyes. Her heart will not stop racing. "I don't suppose someone in here wants to light a candle."

Vivienne begins to break one hand away from her sigil, but Merrill waves her off. "I will," she says, and flicks her fingers out all at once so that a half-dozen candles scattered over sconce and tabletop light themselves. "There, lethallan. Is that better?"

She doesn't answer. Too much to risk, these things already knowing her desires too well; instead she looks past her to the one who looks like Fenris, who's at least made her promises she can trust. "Is there any more water?"

He nods, and wordlessly fetches the clay pitcher and the little metal cup from the sideboard, his eyes shadowed in candlelight. She still cannot manage her good hand with any reliability; he holds the cup for her twice more as Merrill lifts her head, then puts it away and comes to stand next to Merrill by the bed. He's in sleeping clothes now, a red open-collared shirt and tan linen leggings, and his feet are bare. Better.

"Was it a dream?" he asks, his voice rough with sleep.

She must swallow around a sudden lump in her throat at the sound of it. "Yes," she manages with almost no irony. "As you should know."

His mouth twists, though he does not argue. "Are you hungry?"

"Yes."

He goes to the sideboard again, to the round plates of bread and wine there, and Merrill folds her fingers through Hawke's. "Lethallan," she says, bright as sunflowers, "I have missed you—_so _much. I can't tell you how glad I am you're here at last, that you're—oh, I wish I could find the words for it! I thought you'd be asleep so I wouldn't have to be ready to tell you yet, but oh, now you're _awake_ and I—"

And now Merrill is crying, unashamed, tears streaking down both cheeks as she leans forward and wraps her arms around Hawke's neck. "Lethallan," she says again. Her hair smells like mint. "We have been looking for you for so long. I'm so sorry we couldn't find you sooner. I—we—oh, Isabela would know what to say—only you know how she guards her own heart, so she said she wouldn't come until there was something to come _for_, so only I'm here instead, and I—and we—I'm _sorry_, lethallan. Oh, dear_._"

_My magic will serve—_

It's a demon. It's a demon wearing Merrill's face, and Merrill's voice, and the only reason it is saying these things is because it knows how much Hawke wishes to hear them. It is _not real_.

"It's all right," Hawke says instead, and closes her eyes. Vivienne's magic hums gently through the room, and Fenris stands patiently at her elbow with another bowl of dark bread and a few strips of cold chicken. Surely this alone will not tip the scale, if she can endure to the end. Surely…

"You've been sleeping for most of the day," Vivienne tells her, and the green glow of her magic thrums a little stronger. Hawke knows the taste of healing magic well by now; this is leagues better than her own, though neither so strong nor so precise as Anders's. "A good thing for your recovery, my dear, but a wounded mind needs wakefulness to return to fertile soil."

"Whose mind is wounded?" she retorts, though it's somewhat lessened by Merrill straightening and stroking her hair fondly. "_Your _mind is wounded. I happen to be the only sane one present."

Vivienne de Fer smiles, small and amused; Merrill giggles. Hawke doesn't wish to look at Fenris—somehow the idea of his smile frightens her more than a broken promise—but his hand drops into her view, a torn piece of dark bread held gently in his fingers. It has even, she realizes, been dolloped in cream, and against her will she looks up.

No smile. Only a lifted eyebrow, black as pitch, and a gentleness in his face that nearly breaks her heart.

Hawke eats the bread from his hands, and the chicken, and another palmful of blueberries, one by one. Merrill tells her some story of a birds' nest she found overturned in the Inquisition's gardens, and of how she nursed the hatchlings to health and how ugly they were for weeks. Vivienne finishes her healing, leaving Hawke's legs numb for the night—and glad of it she is, if she's honest—before withdrawing and closing the door behind her. Fenris fetches her one more cup of water, then pinches out most of the candles before retreating to his cot again.

Somehow Merrill ends up curled on the bed beside her, her fingers linked with Hawke's good hand, her tousled black hair against Hawke's bare shoulder. Fenris watches them both from the wall, his eyes gleaming green and bright in the moonlight for a long time, but it's a pleasant silence in the places where Merrill's chatter falls away, and eventually even that light dims as he leans his head back and closes his eyes at last.

_My magic will serve that which is best in me._

But it is a good dream, Hawke thinks, and she listens to Merrill's even breathing for a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

**Recommended listening:** Eyes Shut by Ólafur Arnalds & Alice Sara Ott (watch?v=OtVbdCpNetE).

* * *

Am I kin to Sorrow,  
That so oft  
Falls the knocker of my door —  
Neither loud nor soft,  
But as long accustomed,  
Under Sorrow's hand?  
Marigolds around the step  
And rosemary stand,  
And then comes Sorrow —  
And what does Sorrow care  
For the rosemary  
Or the marigolds there?  
Am I kin to Sorrow?  
Are we kin?  
That so oft upon my door —  
_ Oh, come in!  
_ —_Kin to Sorrow_, Edna St. Vincent Millay

—

"Josephine said you found another pair of off-duty guards loitering near the door to the Inquisitor's tower."

"I did. You should speak to your men. They're growing very bold."

Cullen pinches the bridge of his nose and leans back in his chair. It creaks ominously, but the legs hold another day. "I have, Cassandra. A dozen times. The curious are determined to satisfy themselves no matter what I say."

"And their rumors are dangerous." She turns to perch on the edge of his desk, staring out the window to the courtyard below. "Not only for the Champion, though her road is hard enough."

"Mm. Leliana has reassured me that Helista may be trusted, but there were enough eyes in the hall the first day that this won't be quelled much longer. We'll have to issue something, if only to keep the wolves away from the door."

Cassandra sighs, curling her fingers around the lip of the desk, and her shoulders—just barely—slump. "Josephine will know what to say. I did not wish for more theatre, but it seems we've little choice. Perhaps she can persuade them it is some other foreign dignitary taken ill unexpectedly."

"Fenris's presence will give the lie to that, don't you think?" He picks up a pen, tests the nib, and puts it to the side again without touching the unfinished report at his elbow. "For those who have read Varric's novels, at least."

"That damned dwarf," Cassandra says without rancor.

A quiet falls between them, not tense but not easy either. Six days the Champion of Kirkwall has lain bedridden in the eastern tower, a floor below the Inquisitor's own rooms, still as convinced as the first morning she woke that nothing she touches is real. Cullen had protested at first. Hawke had been gone for months in a world not even their own; who knew how she might have changed without and within? Who but the Maker could see if a demon had touched her soul more deeply than she realized? Better to give her—any other rooms in Skyhold, really, at least until they were certain.

But Priory had looked at him and said, "She'll stay _here_, Cullen," and that had been that.

And now this dustup in the ranks, nosy servants and raw recruits alike come skulking at the tower's side door as if one glimpse beyond it might answer all mysteries in the world. None have yet been so bold as to breach it uninvited, the Inquisitor's distinction still enough to keep up a healthy reverence, but he's certain it's only a matter of time. Perhaps they _should _start locking that door, though it's enough inconvenience his heart sinks. He'll have to speak to Requisitions about having a fitting installed and spare keys made, _and _he'll have to draft the list of the appropriate recipients, _damn_ it, and oversee the distribution of the keys. One more thing for the endless list of urgencies.

"Well?"

Cullen blinks, abruptly aware Cassandra has been speaking to him for some time. "Forgive me; my mind wandered. What did you say?"

"I said, have you visited the Champion lately?"

He shakes his head. "And you?"

"Yesterday. It was…enlightening." A muscle in her jaw jumps; she's worrying the inside of her lip again, he realizes, and sighs. "She knew me and…she did not know me. Her laughter makes me uneasy."

"It makes everyone uneasy. Dorian believes she is trying to protect herself."

"By frightening her friends."

One word he's written on this report in thirty minutes, and he's just now seen it's misspelled. "You know what she believes the truth to be. If even Fenris can't convince her otherwise, the rest of us have little chance. There's nothing for us to do but wait."

Cassandra makes a noise of agreement, then pushes away from the desk and goes to stand at the window with folded arms. Cullen can hear the rhythmic clacking of wooden swords in the training grounds below; every now and then he catches a voice raised on the wind: Dorian, Dagna, Sera's raucous laughter. Cassandra says, "How soon until Varric returns?"

"My scouts say four days. He and the Chargers have almost cleared the Emerald Graves of the last bandit camps."

"The Iron Bull said it would take two weeks. Only a few days late, then."

"I'm sure Blackwall's assistance has been crucial in returning so swiftly." Cullen presses the heels of his hands hard over his eyes, then blows out a sigh. "If we had known of the solstice then, I'm sure the Inquisitor would not have asked them to go…but no one could have anticipated needing to begin the ritual for the mirror so suddenly."

"The ritual," Cassandra says darkly. "Fortunate indeed no one was lost to such a foolhardy venture."

His own thoughts voiced aloud—but it stings, somehow, to hear them so clear and certain. "Foolhardy it might have been, but you know as well as I that Varric would never have gone to the Graves had Dorian realized how little time was left for the magic to work."

Cassandra snorts. "He would have fought Dorian for the privilege of the rescue. As it is, the ambassador from Kirkwall has been hounding Josephine for the details of his return morning and night. That alone was impetus enough to flee, I think."

"He will be home soon enough. Fenris wishes for him to be brought to Hawke the moment the company returns."

A long silence, stiff as the cut of Cassandra's shoulders. Then, her voice hot: "He should have been told immediately."

Cullen runs a hand over his hair. How many times have they had this argument? "Lady Trevelyan believes he must be told in person." And he agrees with her, if he's honest—

"And _I _believe—" Cassandra starts, eyes flashing, but they're both arrested by the sight of Cole crouched on the chair pulled before Cullen's desk.

"Hello," says Cole, and cocks his head. No hat, no shoes; he's found a sprig of amaranth he's tucked behind one ear.

"Cole," Cullen says needlessly. "Is something wrong?"

"I tried to help, but she's walled it all away with stone. Grieving, guilty, galled; she can't look her in the eye. She won't let me in."

"Who? Hawke?"

He shakes his head, then shudders with his whole body as if icy hands have dragged across his neck. "If the bird breaks enough mirrors, she'll surely find a window, but the mirrors always break her back. Her heart's full almost to the brim with glass shards. She wants to be real more than anything, but she can't, because then they'll know and she'll never be real again. No," he says, and shudders once more, "_Inquisitor_."

"Lady Trevelyan?" Cullen pushes up from his desk, smearing a decided stripe of ink across the last line of the now-useless report. Cole's not in a panic, so there's no immediate danger, but he's out of patience with these problems he can't fix. "Where is she?"

"In the rookery."

Cullen nods, faintly surprised as always when his hand to Cole's shoulder lands on something tangible, and goes out into the day.

—

Leliana is not in the rookery when Cullen arrives. It's both a surprise and a shame, as he'd been rather depending on her help to locate the errant Inquisitor, but even with his woeful hunter's instincts he eventually manages to spy a glimpse of cropped blonde hair and green eyes over the edge of one of the unpacked crates. Not looking at him, though. Rather, he realizes as he circles the platforms carefully, she's watching a pair of ravens perched on the wood slats before her, dancing over her hunched shadow, toying with a long bit of silver wire between them. She's got one end of it in her fingers and twitches it every now and again, enough to make them hop, but other than that her face stays buried in her knees, her other arm, the marked one, wrapped around her booted shins.

"There you are," he says softly, but she still jumps.

"Cullen!"

The bit of wire tumbles out of her fingers, lost in one silver glint to shadow and dust. The ravens take indignant flight, cawing displeasure, and perch again on the rafters above them with angry twists of their heads. He winces and keeps a wide berth of the pair as he reaches her.

She looks up at him, unsmiling, then wraps her other arm over the top of her knees and drops her mouth behind it. "You must think I'm a coward," she says, only slightly muffled.

"I never have, and I never will." He eases a portion of his weight onto one of the crates she's tucked herself between. "You frightened Cole."

"I upset Cole. There's a difference."

As uncharitable as he's ever heard her, given how openly she adores the boy who was once a spirit. "What happened?"

"He wishes me to go see the Champion." Priory leans her head back and closes her eyes. A narrow face—but everything about her is narrow, all of her stretched taller and thinner than she should be, gangly as a colt and as lovely. "He won't say why. Well, not directly, anyway."

"And you don't wish to."

"I do not," she says too sharply, and then her face crumples all at once and she buries it in her arms. "Cullen, it's all such a mess. How can I possibly…"

He tips his head back, looking up at the slatted roof of the rookery and the cool, narrow shafts of sunlight slanting through the gaps. One raven calls softly to another, then lifts off in a flutter of wings for another perch.

"Fenris does not blame you," he says at last.

She flinches. "He does, a little. Not as much as he ought."

"But he believes Hawke will not either."

"That's not what he said. He said he doesn't think I forced her to stay behind back then. He's said nothing about what's happened since."

"Have you spoken with him?"

"A little." She straightens enough to rub both hands across her face, then leaves them there, her voice stifled by her palms. "A few times in the halls, when the healers are seeing to her and the room grows too crowded. He's asked after Varric. I think he hopes he—he will help, somehow."

"He might. A few days yet." Another hush falls, and then Cullen ventures, "If you will forgive me, it seems…unlike you to hide from your problem so adamantly."

"Is that what I'm doing? Hiding?"

Cullen lifts an eyebrow, letting the full force of their surroundings sink in: an abandoned rookery at the top of the highest tower in the stronghold, the Herald of Andraste tucked as far in a corner as possible between crates as tall as his waist, her knees pulled under her chin and her face covered with her own hands.

"Yes," he says eventually, just in case she needs the word aloud.

"I've sent soldiers to their deaths," Priory says, too loud, abrupt as a tree falling and as fast. Her hands have dropped away; she's looking at Leliana's little shrine to Andraste now, instead of him, but at least she's not burying herself anymore. "I've done it willingly. I've condemned men to die in cold blood because I believed it just. I've killed more people than I can count—I've killed them in self-defense because I didn't want to die, and I've flushed them out like hare and hunted them down while they ran. I've done these things and I have not regretted them."

"…And?" he prompts, when she does not look like she will continue.

_Now _she stands—explodes, almost, lurching to her feet so suddenly she nearly falls and a handful of ravens blur into the air, squawking angrily. Their wingbeats disrupt the little shafts of sunlight, flashing shadow in sharp contrast over Priory's face. The anger in her eyes doesn't dim, though, and he doesn't know if it's meant for him or for herself.

"Cullen, I've got more blood on my hands than most armies. There are enough dead behind my banner I could choke a lake, and do you know—" She's pacing now, short, sharp steps, back and forth on this small slatted platform, her dexterous hands cutting through the air. "Do you know what the worst part is? It isn't even the letters I keep writing to tell people their fathers aren't coming home, or their wives, or their daughters, so here's a bit of coin and a signature as if it might heal the wound. Cullen—"

She wrenches herself to face him, high color on her cheeks, and there are tears standing in her eyes. "Cullen, _I can_ _live with it_. I can. Truly, of everything I've done, that's almost the most appalling part."

He can sense she's not finished, so he bites back his first response, and his second, as her tears recede through an obvious force of will. She swallows, hard, and says, "But I have never—never—_never _tortured someone into madness. Ever since I was a girl and my brothers taught me to hunt grouse in the woods behind the manor—that's one of the first lessons they drilled into me. Kill when you must, and kill cleanly. Kill them fast. Cullen, when I looked at that horrible creature Nightmare in the Fade and Hawke said that she would stay behind to distract it, I thought—"

Her voice chokes off at last, but he can finally see where she's going with this. "You thought she would die quickly. Oh, Priory."

"I thought—I thought—" and she's crying again, the back of her hand angrily swiping at tears that won't stop. "I was willing to let her die for us. For me. The Champion of Kirkwall, who's never been anything but kind when I was most unsure of myself; and I was ready to let her throw away her life because I believed it necessary at the time. I could bear the weight of that. But when Fenris came to us in Cloudreach and said he believed she was alive, and we started finding the pieces to prove it—the dreams, the eluvian waking, the papers from Dorian's library—it grew worse and worse and worse. And when we found her in the Fade, when we walked up and saw this thing lying there, this—this living skeleton who didn't know us from demons, I—"

He tries to take her hand, to still her from this caustic torrent, but she yanks herself away.

"I wanted to be _sick_," she gasps, both hands at her own throat. "I was prepared for her to be dead. I _wanted_ her to be dead, safely dead. And then she was _alive_, alive this whole time and in agony, tortured into madness and starving and Cullen—Cullen, _I left her there!_"

She stares at him, heaving for breath in the sudden ringing silence. Her face is parchment-pale, her eyes so wide the whites show all around them. She's hunched defensively—he doesn't even think she's realized it—and at the risk of a knife to his ribs, Cullen reaches out and takes her firmly by both shoulders.

"Come here," he says, and when no dagger appears between them he pulls her into a hard embrace. She doesn't relax—indeed, he's held softer training dummies—but she doesn't fight him either, and he's willing enough to wait until she can hear him again.

How long since Corypheus died? How long since he watched her stagger from the side of a blasted mountain, bleeding badly from a slice across her forehead but smiling despite it, her marked hand aloft in victory? Not a month yet, and already he has forgotten how deep her doubt runs. Cullen brushes his hand down the back of her head, the nape of her neck, long, lingering strokes meant to calm himself as much as her, and tries to choke down the deep, ferocious part of him that wants nothing more to take up his sword and shield against this thing that has hurt her and beat it until there is nothing left.

What can he do for her, anyway? The Maker's first children plucked her alone out of all the mortal world to save them; even now he hears the reverence in his recruits' voices when they murmur of her, in Mother Giselle's sermons when she speaks of callings, and chants, and higher causes. He is a broken man with a decade of mistakes dragged behind his heels, and she is—

And she is a woman, crying, and he loves her.

Cullen closes his eyes, tightening his arms around her so that her shuddering gasps wrack through him as well. Something in his chest has clenched like a fist; he _loves_ her, even if he's not sure he has the right to, and somehow she's fool enough to love him in return. She may doubt all else; but he loves her, desperately as a falcon seeks the sky, and at least here in this rookery he will leave her no more room for the wondering.

Eventually, seconds, minutes, hours later, her shoulders unbend the barest inch and she drops her forehead onto his shoulder. She's still crying, shuddering, but she's not quite so stricken, and he can feel the turn of her head when he begins to speak.

"When we were in Kirkwall, the Qunari shipwrecked on the coast. They lived on the docks for some time, waiting, and in 9:34 they attacked the city. You've heard of this." He doesn't really expect an answer, but the nod is encouraging. "It was a circuitous path, but eventually they decided the fate of the city would depend on a duel between Hawke and the Arishok."

"I've read Varric's book," Priory says into the fur of his collar. "Hawke won. The city was saved, and she was lifted to the position of Champion."

"The Arishok nearly split her in half." _That _gets her attention. "I was in the Keep when it happened. He had a sword—cleaver, really—and when the fight was almost over he speared her on it like a toasting fork."

She's angry at him now; he can feel it in the stiffness of her back. "Is this meant to make me feel better?"

"Do you want to feel better?"

Her voice is tight. "No."

"She killed the Arishok with lightning and fire while she was in the air. She fell, and the sword tore out her side in the falling. There was so much blood you could not tell skin from steel."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"She _lived,_ Priory. Do you understand?" He pulls back, looks her square in the eye until he's sure she's listening. "No one should have survived such a wound. No one. She should have died in minutes, but Fenris was there and her healer was there, and where every other woman in Thedas ought to have died, she lived instead."

"She's a powerful mage," Priory says slowly, but there's light in her eyes and he thinks she's beginning to see what he means.

"Hawke is powerful," he allows, no longer as bitter as it once was, "but that's not what saved her. Her friends did, the people to whom she trusted her life. She fought for them because she knew they were worth fighting for, because she knew that if a thing could be done to save her after, they would do it. She made her choices because she knew who stood beside her." He asks again, "Do you understand?"

Her eyes skitter away from his, shame flushing her cheeks. "I wasn't willing to look, though, not on my own. I didn't give it a second thought until he came to ask."

"But the moment he did, you listened. And when it became clear something could be done, you did _not_ listen to anyone who would have stopped you." He has to stop for a moment, his throat closing with his own regret. "Even me. Especially me."

"Cullen…"

"We all have our private selfishness. I did not want you to do this because all I could see was the danger to you. To go back willingly to a place you should have died in to begin with… But you saw more than I did. You knew what it meant, when you realized she was alive, and even though you feared what you would find you went back for her anyway." He ducks his head, one hand slipping to her cheek until she looks him in the eye again. "Priory, Hawke stayed in the Fade for you because she knew what kind of person you are. She _trusted _you. Still does, I'm sure, even if she doesn't remember it yet."

"I don't _deserve _it. I never have."

"That isn't yours to decide," he says, and when her eyes close he leans forward and gently kisses the corner of her mouth. She turns her head, desperate, and he kisses her again, properly, quietly. "I have known Hawke more than ten years," he murmurs, and there are all the memories ready at his fingertips, wanting only the turn of the page—Hawke fresh to the wealth of her mother's estate, cheap mail over cheaper leather, her eyes wide at the towering mansions and the golden Chantry spire; Hawke laughing at him, not unkindly, as she failed to hide her staff behind her back and tried to bribe him with Fereldan honey cakes. Hawke, older, sterner, telling him in no uncertain terms Keran had been possessed by no demon and cursing his stubbornness to his face; Hawke at the ceremony where she was named Champion, her hair done properly for the first time in his memory, the dress's boning not enough to hide the stiff, heavy bandages still beneath as she took the iron circlet from Meredith's hands.

Hawke, standing in the Gallows courtyard on a night choked with ash and flame, Fenris and the captain of the Guard at her back, blades drawn, her staff blazing like a sun. She'd looked back at him once, when everything was finished and he had thrown down his sword to let her pass unhindered, and she had smiled…

He sighs. "Ten years," he says again, "and not once in all that time have I ever seen her call someone a friend and regret it. Even, perhaps, when she should have."

Priory shakes her head, but the blotchy flush is fading and her hands are steadier than they were. She thumbs the edge of his coat silently, thinking; a raven swoops overhead and winks them both into shadow before the sunlight eases across them once more, threading down the gold of her hair and the collar of her shirt. She says, her voice soft, "I'll go and see Hawke."

"Go and see Hawke, Lady Trevelyan," Cullen echoes fondly, and lets her lead him by the hand from the rookery.


	5. Chapter 5

**Warnings for this chapter:** discussion of the death of a child.

* * *

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;  
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man  
In me ór, most weary, cry _I can no more_. I can;  
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.  
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me  
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan  
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,  
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?  
—_Carrion Comfort, _Gerard Manley Hopkins

—

They go together, and they find Hawke awake and more cheerful than she has been in some time. Even Fenris is easier than Cullen has seen him in months, idly mending a dent in one of his gauntlets where he sits in the window as Priory gulps down her nerves and approaches Hawke's bedside. Cullen intends to put a hand on her back, or her shoulder—_some _show of support—but Hawke smiles the moment she sees Priory, blinding and brilliant, and he can't help stepping back for their privacy.

"I can't say I expected you," Hawke says, propping her chin on her hand. She's sitting up on her own now, pillows stacked behind her back, her good arm well-healed and her bad one reduced to only a small plaster cast over her wrist and fingers. Her legs remain splinted and bound, though, and she remains forbidden from rising by Dorian and his army of healers. "Your hair's shorter than last time. I think it's a good choice."

"Leliana shaved the sides for me last week," she admits, touching it self-consciously. "I—I came to see how you were."

"Light as a feather, free as a bird. However this ends will almost be worth it, honestly; I've always loved goosedown, and even if it isn't real, it's so _nice _not to want to chew off one's own leg from hunger."

That flinch Cullen can see, though Priory readily takes the walnut armchair to which Fenris gestures. "If there's anything you'd like specifically, I'm sure we can arrange it. The kitchen is always complaining I don't challenge them enough."

And now Hawke hesitates, glancing an instant at Fenris, who shakes his head gently, before replying. "Scones," she says, and laughs. "And spiced jelly. And stuffed capons. And—while I'm dreaming—pork in wine sauce, and stewed apples with mint and cinnamon, and a bowl of candied almonds. Tartlets of elderflower, too, to make it as complicated as possible." She laughs again, only the barest manic edge to it, and rolls her head on the pile of pillows to face the Inquisitor. "It's kind of you to ask. How's the hand?"

Priory is notoriously close-mouthed about the anchor's discomfort, but when Hawke asks she unfurls her hand flower-like between them, the dim-lit crack to elsewhere in her palm humming gently in the air. "It's all right," she says, and lets Hawke feather a touch over the edge of the mark. Cullen sees Hawke's eyebrows furrow, just for an instant, but Priory continues. "I overdid it when we went through to get you, but it's not been so bad since we've returned. Not many breaches left to close these days."

"When you went through…oh, yes. The eluvian. Fenris has told me all about it."

Mocking, but not cruel. Fenris closes his eyes. "So I did. The Inquisitor's assistance was vital."

Priory waves his words away, embarrassed, but Hawke takes to the topic readily enough, and soon she and the Inquisitor are engaged in a new repetition of the events of Hawke's rescue. Sanitized on both sides, Cullen thinks from what he hears, and Hawke more interested in discovering the places where her story and Fenris's do not match, but he lets them talk in favor of coming to join Fenris at the window. The gauntlet is almost mended, the dent returned to its proper shape; now he oils the metal with a stained rag, working it into the fine grooved creases until they shine.

"Is everything all right?" Cullen asks, knowing as the words leave his mouth it's a stupid question.

Fenris lifts an eyebrow, and isn't _that _enough to make him feel every syllable of his idiocy, but he mercifully lets it go. "It is a good day," he says at last, and gestures with his head at Hawke, who listens animatedly to Priory's story of finding Merrill on Isabela's ship near Wycome. "She is willing to speak and eat. She accepts that I am not trying to kill her at the moment. She has even, in fact, refrained from throwing the cutlery at me after eating this morning, which is a marked improvement."

"I see," Cullen allows, because he does, but that isn't what he asked. "Fenris, how are _you_?"

Fenris's hand slips on the gauntlet. One of the razor-sharp fingertips slices deep into the side of his forefinger, drawing a line of blood immediately; Fenris does not even grimace, only puts his hand to his mouth and sucks until the bleeding slows, then wraps it in the oiled cloth. The gauntlet he leaves in his lap, mirror-gleaming in the sunlight, throwing back the sky's blue hot enough to burn.

Fenris looks up, then, and meets Cullen's eyes, and the instant's bare glimpse he's allowed before Fenris walls himself off like a slammed gate is enough Cullen feels sick for the asking. "She is alive," Fenris says, low and fierce. "That is enough."

"I'm sorry," Cullen says wretchedly.

Fenris leans his head back against the stone jamb and looks out the window. A beautiful day, warmer than Skyhold has any right to be, though Cullen knows venturing not twenty feet from the front gate will bring back all the ice the wind can hold. The mountains are visible over the walls from the height of this room, white snowcaps glittering against the cloudless sky; Cullen can even see a few of his guards as they depart on horseback for the afternoon patrol, their heavy coats unbuttoned for now until they pass out of Skyhold's ancient protection.

To be honest, he's not entirely easy with the elf sitting so blithely in the window as he does, but he's hardly a callow youth to pull back to safety. Instead, Cullen swallows, and says, "I'll get the almonds."

"What?"

"The candied almonds. I remember—in Kirkwall—" and damn him if Fenris's raised eyebrows don't make him feel as small as a schoolboy, "—she would have them sometimes, in a little yellow bag, when she came to the Gallows. She would share while we waited for Meredith. I remember—well, if you would like it, anyway. If Hawke would, that is. I can speak to Requisitions."

Maker, Cullen, stop _talking_. But Fenris is faintly smiling now, one corner of his mouth turned up. "Thank you, Commander," he says. "That would be appreciated."

"I—good. It shouldn't be long. Varric should be back from the Emerald Graves in a few days, and the next shipment should come soon after."

"_Good_," Fenris says, more serious, and looks to Hawke. "She said…" he hesitates, a man pausing at the first steep step, then takes a breath and continues. "It comes in pieces, but I have gathered that most of the demons who attempted to thrall her were too weak to make more than two or three figures from her memories. Only the most powerful could make the visions seem truly real. The more who come to her here that she knows, who are dear to her…it is, perhaps, reason to hope."

A flicker of memory: a cage of raw force, runed Circle stone toppling down around his ears, and the Warden who would be Queen staring at him through bars of light as he babbled. Cullen scrapes a hand over the back of his neck. "It was not so dire, but I have some experience with the traps demons lay for mortal minds. I remember there were never more than a few faces I recognized—" _feared_— "at a time, and that the rooms were always small, though I never questioned it until later. Their power is not infinite."

"Hm." Fenris watches Hawke a while longer, his face thoughtful, and then he pushes away from the windowsill and stands. "I have one more favor to ask, Commander."

"Cullen, please."

He inclines his head, graceful enough Cullen can feel every gilded inch of Tevinter in the gesture. "I have written to Hawke's brother, Carver. He is a Warden in the Coastlands, last I heard, but I do not know where exactly to find his unit's camp. If I give you this letter, will you have him discovered and brought here? He…I believe it would mean a great deal to Hawke, if he were found."

"Of course."

He takes the letter Fenris offers, the writing cramped and spidering across the envelope, and tucks it into his vest. He's got enough scouts north of Skyhold the Wardens should not be overly difficult to locate, not with Stroud still leading their men, still ready to aid the Inquisition when it calls. "It will be done immediately," he adds, just so they are both certain, and with a short bow to Fenris and a flick of a wave at Priory and Hawke at the bed, both of them still talking, still smiling, he departs the room.

Reason to hope, he tells himself, though the look in Fenris's eyes stays with him the rest of the afternoon.

—

A cold hand jerks him awake just after third bell. He's reaching for his sword before his mind catches up, thick and muzzy from dreams of lyrium bleeding out of a cut in Fenris's hand—and then Cole registers, Cole's white face in the starlight, eyes wide and panicked. And Priory—Priory leaning around Cullen with one bare, glittering dagger already fisted in hand.

"Cole," she says, rough with sleep and still ten times more awake than Cullen. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"She was dreaming," he says fretfully, his hands wringing together. "Back where she should be, now that she's here again, but they knew her smell too well. They found her and dreamed for her, just like they used to, but it was too terrible, and now she's crying."

"Crying?"

"Crying fire," Cole says, and a distant explosion rattles the dust from the stones around them.

Not an instant wasted. They're both up, sheets whirling, bare feet slapping on stone as Cullen yanks his sword from the rack. No time for anything else, even with no armor aside from their thin night-linens. Priory slams open the door to her rooms, not bothering to check its horrendous crash against the wall; as they reach the stairs another explosion booms through the air, the air hot and tinged with the smell of storm lightning.

"Shit," Cullen breathes, because if this is what he thinks—

"Here," says Priory, but Hawke's door is locked from the inside and they've left the damned keys upstairs and Cole's behind them now, hands over his mouth, frantic as smoke begins to seep from under the door.

The hinge shatters on the second bullrush. It takes a few seconds for Cullen to slow the run, his shoulder throbbing as he swings up his sword—

The curtains are on fire. Fully ablaze, not some small smolder; scorch marks and the white hoarfrost of ice magic scatter across all four walls and the ceiling. One of the armoires has been reduced to splinters, and in the little space left uncharred stands Fenris, bare from the waist up, both arms wrapped hard around Hawke from behind—Hawke who is screaming, _screaming_, her splinted legs kicking at Fenris's own, scrabbling across the floor wherever she can reach, one arm pinned by Fenris's grasp across her chest, the other spread like a wing, white-hot flame rolling down from her shoulder in fat gouts like living oil.

"Maker," Priory gasps, "_Andraste—_" and even as she leaps forward to do—something—Hawke twists in Fenris's arms and thrusts a palmful of fire at his face.

He ducks it by only the barest margin, filling the room with the smell of scorched hair. It's enough to loosen his grip, though, just enough that Hawke slithers loose, her face wild, enraged with a dreadful violence Cullen has never seen in her before. She can hardly walk, her legs still fragile beyond measure, but magic explodes in the air around him to overturn Helista's cart in a rattle of smashed crockery and then Hawke's moving—_so_ much faster than she should be able to, knocking back Priory with a fistful of lightning, only Cullen now between her and the door, fire roaring down the lengths of both arms and naked death in her eyes—

"Stop her!" Fenris bellows, one arm thrown over his face against the heat. The lyrium in his skin is a riot of unchecked power, brilliant flashes making the elf stagger, and Cullen—

"I'm sorry," he chokes out, and makes a fist in the air between them. Hawke freezes in place, jaw locked.

Maker. Maker and his Light, he'd known she was powerful, but _this_—and no lyrium to help him, not here—his breath hisses through his teeth as he gathers every scrap of power he can sense, every coil of this raw, unfiltered magic billowing off Hawke in waves. It's not all of it, could never be—even at his best he doesn't know if he could have held the depth of this—but it's _enough_, and he wraps his other hand around his own fist and _yanks _with every drop of strength left in his blood.

It's enough—

It's _enough_.

A templar's Silence is no easy thing to shrug off, and even Hawke is little different. The fire winks out along her arms in a puff of smoke, her fingers flexing involuntarily under the immense pressure of her magic's loss. The false strength vanishes; she stumbles, one blind hand outstretched, and Cullen's barely able to catch her before she falls. Abruptly she is thin again, back to the near-starving human woman in his arms without the magic to buttress her; her eyes roll sightless for a few moments before fixing on Cullen's face.

Her lip curls; she spits, and he turns just in time for it to land on the side of his neck.

At least the curtains are already down. Cole has found some enormous bucket of water—somewhere, and Priory has already rolled the soaked brocade into a tight ball that she throws to the floor and beats until the last smoldering embers are put out. A quick glance tells him nothing else in the room actively burns, though it's thick with smoke and the smell of lightning.

"I'll get the shutters," Priory says unnecessarily, and does, waving out the smoke with her arms. Cole takes the bucket to the door. "They're afraid someone's been hurt," he says aloud, and looks to Cullen as two guards come rushing up the stairs from the door to the great hall.

It takes a few minutes to persuade them—and rightly so, given the state of the room: door off its hinges, ruined and smoking curtains, char and ash on every wall, Fenris leaning heavily on one of the bed's white posts, Hawke verging unconsciousness in Cullen's lap where he kneels on the white-and-gold rug. Lieutenant Somal in particular throws misgiving looks at the shattered armoire, despite Cullen's reassurances; still, eventually, once the alarm is stifled and the soot mostly cleared, they allow themselves to be dismissed, though not without propping Hawke's door loosely back in place. Their footsteps fade down the wooden stairs into the distance, and then nothing is left but all the blank silence of a madwoman having nearly burned down the entire fortress.

"They died," Cole whispers into the quiet, his eyes luminescent as he looks at Hawke.

She looks back, her face white, and says nothing. Neither of them blink.

"What a tiny thing, precious, priceless, perfect beyond measure. Little fingers, little ears, not as pointed as his but more than mine. Eyes as big as moons, and those are him all over, green as the moss in a forest, green as spring. No single heart is big enough for this."

Fenris takes a terrible, shuddering breath.

"The time is stretched all wrong, but I don't care. Look at how big—look at how strong—look at how right it is when he carries her on his shoulders. I could burn the world for this. I could. I would, if I had to, to ash and rust."

Was this how it felt at Andraste's pyre? This hideous weight in the air, doom in every word…

"They said the slavers were gone. They said they were gone. Why are they _here_? Lash-strikes, lanterns licking, the luster of steel in flame." Cole's eyelids flutter; no one speaks to stop him. Not even Hawke. "Their torches burn like eyes. Doors barring them in and I'm on the wrong side; I can hear them screaming through the smoke, Maker, Maker. Soul and staff, blood and bone, take it all, take everything if it will stop. I thought I could bear whatever they showed me. I was wrong. I was wrong."

Hawke trembles like a stream—or is that Cullen? He can't tell. Her cheeks have stained with tears, eyes huge.

Cole comes to her then, crouches down, and takes her good hand in both of his. "It's all right to hurt," he says, sure as a psalm. "It was real to you."

The sound she makes is awful, a dry sob that shatters through her frame. Fenris's knuckles clench so tightly around the bedpost that the wood creaks, but Cullen knows what Hawke told Fenris that first day—_don't touch me—_and he does not move to hold her despite his clear desperation. Instead he lets Cullen stand and walk with Hawke to the bed again, mercifully unsinged, and makes way for Priory to sit at Hawke's side in the walnut chair instead of him. He does not go back to the cot, though; after a moment's stillness he circles and moves to sit on the other side of the bed with his back to Hawke, his hands fisted on his knees, as close as he can be all the same. His bare back is so stiff it might have been carved from marble.

There's a long, long silence, broken only by the sound of Hawke's gasps, muffled in the crook of her own elbow. Fenris's lyrium keeps going off like lightning, rippling down his spine in unsteady flashes, curling around his ribs. The room is heavy with smoke and grief.

Eventually, so low Cullen thinks he might have imagined it, Priory says, "Ten years ago, one of my brothers and his wife found out they were going to have a child."

A pause as she waits; with no interruption, she continues. He doesn't know if she's meant to do it, but she's pitched her voice like a song. A lullaby, perhaps. "They had a little boy. It was the first grandchild for my parents, who loved children, and he had hair as pale as wheat and grey eyes, and he was perfect. Until he got colic when he was six months old, and then he cried, and cried, and cried…"

She tells Hawke, quiet as the rushes, about how she went to visit her brother and his wife and held their son while they slept. About how she used to walk up and down the halls of their manor in Ostwick, babe in arms, singing Chant to him until the wee hours of the morning so that his parents might sleep a few hours in a night.

She tells her about how he grew to love the goats and the way his mother laughed, and about the first time he learned to ride a pony and sat stone-still, afraid of the new height. About the first time he brought her a painting he'd done of the two of them together in the gardens, the first time he called her his favorite aunt.

"His only aunt," she adds wryly, and from under Hawke's arm flickers the barest hint of a smile.

Priory tells her everything. She talks so long Cullen nearly falls asleep, lulled even standing into a light doze. Still an hour or two to dawn, he guesses by the stars now all too visible in the uncurtained window, and notes absently that at some point Cole has disappeared. Time enough. Time enough, yet…

Eventually, when she's talked her nephew all the way to his present age and finds nothing left to add, Priory stands and kisses Hawke gently on the arm still looped over her forehead. "I'll tell you more stories tonight," she says softly, and though Hawke doesn't answer, a new thread of tears slides down her temple into her hair.

Cullen wraps an arm around her as she comes to the doorway to meet him; she's _cold_, and shivering enough he's eager to get her back to bed, though it's like as much from emotion as from the mountain chill. Still, he looks back once more as they leave, the door angled back in place as best he can manage.

Hawke has made a fist in the cloth of Fenris's sleeping linens near his hip, just visible in the watery moonlight. He has covered it with his own in answer, dark lyrium-touched fingers tight around her hand among the rumpled duvet, thumb stroking across the back of her wrist, though he still looks straight ahead. The arm with the red band, Cullen sees, and she has not pulled away.

It's the smallest thing, this little touch, in the middle of enough sorrow to drown in—but Maker—_Maker_, Cullen thinks, given all that came before it—

It's somewhere they can start.


	6. Chapter 6

**Recommended listening:** This Place Was A Shelter by Olafur Arnalds (watch?v=8eo1xMC7VbU) for the first section, and Dauðalogn by Sigur Ros (watch?v=RWtx0AvGAlw) for the second.

* * *

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,  
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?  
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?  
—_Peace_, Gerard Manley Hopkins

You shall have peace with night and sleep.  
It was written in the creep of the mist,  
In the open doors of night horizons.

Peace, night, sleep, all go together.  
In the forgetting of the frogs and the sun,  
In the losing of the grackle's off cry  
And the call of the bird whose name is gone—  
You shall have peace; the mist creeps, the doors open.  
Let night, let sleep, have their way.  
—_Peace, Night, Sleep_, Carl Sandburg

—

Her father, Hawke thinks, staring up at a little fresco of a cherubic infant clutching the neck of a patient mabari, would be ashamed.

Maker knows _she_ is, after all. An entire lifetime of carefully piercing through the worlds they've woven for her, good and bad, to find the truth behind; and one nightmare has her clutching at a demon for comfort. One nightmare—

_—flames licking at the painted wood, mailed hands fisted in her hair to hold her back, and his voice and _her_ voice, panicked at first, and then anguished, screaming, screaming—_

"Shit," Hawke says aloud, and covers her face with her hands as if that will press back the grief. A dream. Only a dream, as much as the cherub and its mabari is only a dream, and she ignores the way her chest stutters with sorrow. Only circles within circles of things that will never be real.

His grip had been tight with grief. His knuckles had clenched so hard around hers they ached, the only rocky anchor in a world gone wavering with heat and tears, and through the horror she had been grateful. Unspeakably grateful, her whole body taut with heartache and the very real scraped-out exhaustion of too much power used too quickly, too much demanded when neither mind nor body could bear the strain. He had been _real_, and she…

He is _not_ real, and she has wasted so much time here.

A knock at the door interrupts her thoughts—thank goodness, she thinks, at real risk of being choked by melancholy—and Hawke pushes to a seated position as Fenris goes to answer the door. His shoulders are still stiff; he will not look at her. _Good_, she tells herself, not quite vicious but with more anger than she needs, and watches Lady Trevelyan's face appear in the gap on the other side.

"Good morning," Priory says softly, and Hawke snorts at the obvious untruth. "I heard you were asking for me."

"Hawke has asked for your company," Fenris says, bland as rust, and steps back to allow her entry. "If you have some time to spare."

"Always. Has it been…" She pauses a bit helplessly, then looks to Hawke. "Not a good morning, then?"

Hawke gives a bark of laughter that's harsh to her own ears. "How perfectly understated, serah. My infinite apologies that this mage does not appreciate the fine craftsmanship in a demon's overt manipulation."

Fenris flinches. Regret spikes through her heart, sharp and twisting; she crushes it ruthlessly and clenches her hands into a spare pillow. His head turns to the wall with his cot so that his hair hides his expression. "All the same, it is best she is not alone for the moment."

"_She's_ right here," Hawke calls, and watches him stagger a step as if she has struck him across the face. Then he steadies, takes three quick strides away from her—and the door closes behind him, firmly, without slamming. "Coward," she adds into the silence, and doesn't know who she's accusing.

Priory blows out a low breath, a pair of fine leather gloves tight in one fist, and then comes to take the abandoned chair at Hawke's elbow. "All right," she says directly. "What happened?"

Her lip curls. What happened—a slow rise from sleep, content and easy as she had not been in—in _months_, flooded with the sense that all was right and whole and good in the world; and Fenris's arm had been tucked over her waist, his breathing deep and sleep-steady at her back. She'd caught her gasp between her teeth—and closed her eyes, and turned her head back into his shoulder, because surely they were home again in the little house where they should have been all this time, the crows calling in the pines beyond the field, the quilt Orana had made for them tucked tightly around their shoulders where it belonged. Where she belonged.

Home, where she _belongs_.

And then he had shifted his weight, and she'd felt the hard plane of his chest tense with worry as he woke, and all at once the memory of _why_ he had stayed had crashed over her like a tidewater roar. And even worse—so much so her stomach jumps with horror at the recall—for just an instant after she'd remembered why she'd clung to a demon for comfort the whole night, she_ had not cared._

He had felt so real. He'd been _solid_, and warm, and his eyes had been gentle as she'd looked back at him over her shoulder, and for a stark, brilliant moment she had thought to herself _I will stay here even so_.

Hawke swallows hard, though it's not enough to dislodge the lump in her throat, and digs her fingernails into the pillow. "Let's say I had a temporary lapse in judgement," she offers, rough as sand. "I'm sure you understand."

"Of course, Champion," Priory says after a long, stretched moment, and settles back in the chair. "Would you like—would it help to discuss it, do you think?"

"How kind you are, Lady Trevelyan," Hawke says—sneers, really, because she likes Priory very much and this is _not her_, no matter how the height is the same and the cheekbones just as sharp. The shoulders here are too broad; the hands are too graceful, twisting around the leather gloves and the awl still held in the same grip. "How kind you have _always_ been to me."

A wild hurt flashes across Priory's eyes, enough that the same guilt spears through Hawke again, before the wound is relentlessly folded back behind an unending patience. "We both know _that_ isn't true."

Hawke feels her face crumple before she snatches at the shards of her anger and pulls them before her in a cracked, worthless shield. Not the same anger as last night, that scorching, feral thing that swallowed her alive in white flame; this is older, stained and yellowed with age and pounding with impotent hurt. "No, I suppose not," she says, all of it edged to cut. "You would have come searching for me by now, if it were so."

The Inquisitor's breath hitches, though her voice is steady. "I did, though I know you don't believe it. I should have come for you sooner."

Hawke scoffs. "Even for this, you're an atrocious liar."

"Yes," she agrees. She's abandoned the half-tooled gloves over one knee; now she's locked to the awl like a lifeline, flipping it over and over in her fingers, twisting the sharp edge against the pad of her thumb in endless circles. "I hope—I hope time will convince you, if nothing else."

"Time!" Hawke says, a furious ache rocketing through her heart. "What do you know of _time_?"

"I—"

"Shut up. Don't you dare lecture me about this. Ten years I gave to Kirkwall and that was thrown back in my face like—like Darktown gutter refuse, and I—" Her skin is buzzing, power seething in her blood—but the raw rise too feeble after last night, vapor-thin and thready, and the fire would not be worth the ash that follows after. "And even _then_ I didn't wish to go, but I did because it was _needed_, and we spent six months finding somewhere new we might put down even the barest roots, and we'd only barely started _that_ when Varric—" and to her horror her voice is growing thick, the words breaking down the middle, and Priory is watching her so silently she might never speak again. "I knew what it meant when I told him yes. I did. I knew what I would leave behind, everything I'd leave undone, and I left anyway, because as much as it hurt I was certain I was doing what was right. What was _necessary_. Because Corypheus was my responsibility, even in the smallest measure."

"Hawke—"

"I _stayed_!" Hawke shouts, and ignores the sting of angry tears. "I stayed here all those months, and in the Fade I stayed again where it's been who knows _how_ long, and all this time—all this _time_—" She breaks off, appalled at herself, and covers her eyes with one hand. "How long?" she says, her fingers trembling, her voice trembling. A dam has unstoppered somewhere, and she can no more close off these words than hold a lightning storm in a clenched fist. "How long? How _long_ will it be this time before this ends and I—and I wake up? Maker knows it's not for my lack of trying."

"Hawke…"

She crushes the heels of her hands into her eyes now, unable to bear the open sympathy. "I planted herbs in my garden," she says, each breath serrated. "And tomatoes, and snap beans. There were birds that would come, jays and swallows, and I would chase them away. Fenris was going to help me find some wire I could enchant and put around the plants to keep them safe. Fenris—I told him—" and now there is a hand on her knee, gently squeezing, and she can hear Priory's unsteady breathing lean closer with the grip. "I told him—I would teach him how to milk goats. We were going to paint the fence alongside the hedge together. We knew—we _knew_ the villagers, even if they didn't trust us, but that was all right, too, because we were going to take our time and it was such a small little town where nothing mattered and everyone had chickens and I—" Hawke breaks off, shuddering.

"And you?" Priory prompts gently, kindly. So kind. So patient. And why not, when the only one desperate for every moment she has left is Hawke?

"And I want to go home," Hawke says, and drags her hands down her face. She knows she's a mess; she doesn't care. They've taken even her will from her here. What's a little honesty for a spirit in the face of that? "I kept telling myself all I had to do was endure. Wait long enough, and something will give. Something will slip, always: a face, or a voice, or a door opening to nowhere. And then I could wake up on that dead rock, and I could begin all over again. Endure again. Last them out again, so I might wake up again, and again, and again. Somehow I'd thought it worth the struggle, because each time would only be one closer to the end of all of it. But…" she laughs against her own will, sharp and sparking. "That's it, isn't it? My great fallacy. I thought there _would_ be an end."

"Hawke," Priory says, and her voice is fierce. "There is an end. There _was_. I swear it to you. I know it's so hard for you to believe it, but I swear—you will not wake up from this."

"Because it's real, or because I've stopped fighting it?" She laughs again, mirthless. "I will never see my house again. I know that now. Will never see Fenris standing in the doorway, calling me in from the garden for a glass of wine. I will never see my _garden_ again. The weeds will overrun everything and the ivy will tear down the mortar and Fenris will die alone, and I will never—"

She breaks off the word like a dead branch, unable to bear the words aloud. Will never kiss him again. Will never feel the earth give under her hands, thick and dark and soaked in sunlight; will never do a thousand things, the great impossibility of all her wasted time choking her at once. How much has she put off for a future that will never come? A lifetime and more, withered on the root, and not a thing left she can do about any of it because—

Because—

Hawke sighs, eyes clenched against nothing, grief struck like a bludgeon across the back of her skull.

She must cling to the despair. Her own, the demon's trick, the white markings dappled along her throat; it doesn't matter. It is the only thing she can do, to clutch it tight as breathing against every temerarious flitter of hope that tempts her in the pre-dawn light. She must—she _must_ believe down to the bones of her that _there is nothing left_, because the only other choice is that this world is—that _all_ of this, all of _them_ are…

That Fenris is—

There's a long silence, not quite anxious; not calm. Priory watches Hawke, unmoving; Hawke closes her eyes and shies from her own thoughts, a dog worrying a bone until nothing is left but marrow. There is no choice here that is not more pain.

Abruptly, Priory shifts, taking the gloves from her lap and handing them to Hawke. "Here," she says, a little gracelessly, and wraps her fingers around each other when Hawke's taking leaves them empty. "I—this is what I was working on, right before you were—when you were trapped. I don't know if you remember."

She doesn't, not really. Just flickers of the Lady Trevelyan idly sketching across scraps of leather at the evening campsites, of a short, squat knife and a stylus made of steel and bone. It seems the outline's become more now, though, the buttery golden leather cut and shaped and stitched into a fine, delicate pair of gloves, reinforced on the palms without losing the elegant lines. A pattern of stamped flowers and embroidered ivy trails over the backs of each hand and around the wrists; more stitching has been started around the cuffs, though they remain obviously unfinished.

Priory lifts the awl, a little embarrassed. "They've languished in a work basket for months. I was—the Inquisition grew distracted."

"Lovely," Hawke says, because they are, and does not succumb to the temptation to see if they might fit. "Why are you showing me this?"

"Because," she starts, looking like she hardly knows herself; then her mouth firms, and it's the truest expression Hawke's seen on her since she woke. "Because they were meant to be for you. They _are_ yours, or will be. Because you ought to see them now, half-done, so you can trust when I'm through with them that I didn't—didn't spring them from nothing." Priory gives a quick, uncertain smile. "Because I have time now to finish them, and you've—you'll have the time to wear them after. If you like them, that is."

Hawke stares. Time to wear… "What are you saying?"

"Hawke," Priory says, swallowing hard, but her eyes are steady as the sky. "Tell me truthfully: do you really think I am a demon come up here to harm you?"

Hawke closes her eyes, breathes in, out, and opens them again.

A pair of leather gloves. A pair of green cat's eyes, and shoulders a bit too broad for the narrow build, and an unending patience. A marked hand flipping a dagger hilt to tip and back again; a voice gone soft and soothing, telling her stories of a little boy she has never met for no reason but to ease her hurt.

She thinks, shocking herself: _no_.

But that little voice in her head surges at the thought, screaming at the thought of saying this aloud, saying this aloud to _her_. Not yet. She is not so brave, not yet, not when so much must follow after. Even if…

Instead, she says, also true, "I wish I knew."

Priory nods, accepting, and before either of them can speak again a knock sounds at the door. "Come in," Priory calls, and Fenris enters with bare feet and a tense, uncertain set to his jaw. A demon's face, a spirit's shaping, unless…

Uncertain because of her, Hawke thinks with no small regret, and sucks in a breath. _Enough of this. You know yourself, if nothing else_. "There you are," she says at last, the lightness only a little forced. "I was starting to think my irascibility and outright bad behavior might have chased you off for good."

He starts, and her heart sinks; then he flashes a brief, small smile. "If not by now, no such behavior could, Hawke."

"Well, that's comforting." She looks down at the gloves in her lap, struggling for words. Half-finished still, and wanting only a little more time. "If I apologize, will you try to steal my soul?"

"I will not."

"Relief indeed." She has nothing left, she tells herself harshly—because if she is wrong, and this _is_ real, then… "I'm sorry, Fenris. What I said was—cruel. I should never have told you such things. Certainly when I didn't mean them."

He shakes his head, a sharp motion that catches the sunlight down the white strands, and comes to the side of the bed next to the Inquisitor's chair. "There is no need to apologize."

"Now _that's_ an outright lie," she says, looking pointedly at Priory, and can't help the faint smile when she laughs. Fenris smiles too, though it's not so strong, and then his gaze drops to her left shoulder. "What is it?" Hawke asks.

"A bit of ash," Fenris explains, his hand already lifting to brush it away—but he arrests himself mid-motion, and drops it once more to his side.

"No," Hawke says, hardly knowing what she means, and lifts her chin for the first time against the little voice pounding at the base of her skull. She wants this—she _wants_, even though she knows it would be more sensible to refuse. Just once, just this time, she would rather… "Go ahead."

His eyes tighten, but in quick, efficient motions he obeys and dusts the ash from last night's grief off the seam of her nightshirt. Hardly any pressure, not even much warmth through the thick double-layered hem; then it is gone, and for just an instant his fingers drop to curl around her shoulder. No name for this but a caress, even in her dreams, and Hawke slowly lifts her eyes to his.

She does not want him to let go.

And yet he does, a few seconds' lifetimes later, his eyes dropping away from hers and a faint color rising to his cheeks. _Don't touch me_, she'd said once, but now—

_Flames and void, hold _on_. _

"Let me give you some privacy," Priory says, low, and Hawke does not stop her as she collects the unfinished gloves and stands and makes her way to the door. She hesitates once at the threshold, head turned over her shoulder—

"Thank you," Hawke says abruptly, because if it is not Priory it does not matter, but if—but if it _is_— "Come again. If you'd like, that is. I'd like to talk a little more."

"I will," Priory tells her, and her eyes crinkle as she smiles. "If you can spare the time for me, anyway."

"I can," Hawke says, the memory of Fenris's hand still burning in her skin, and at least for that moment, she wonders if, in the end, it might be true.

—

Two days later, Fenris steps into the Inquisition's kitchens to see Cassandra, ungloved, wrapping sandwiches in a thin oiled cloth. "Good morning," he says, inclining his head, and goes himself to the trays the cooks have prepared for him at the sideboard. A stack of small sandwiches, an elegant arrangement of sliced hardboiled eggs, a covered bowl of strawberries and cheese. Good. Even now Hawke struggles with the smallest tasks after months of starvation, and the more she is given like this the more quickly she will return to herself.

She must. There is no other choice.

"For the Champion?" Cassandra asks, nodding at the tray. Her own wrapped sandwiches she has placed in a little leather bag knotted to her belt, and she replaces her gloves and then her vambraces with sharp, efficient motions.

"Yes."

"Good. She will need her strength." A hesitation as her gaze flicks to his tray and back again; then she says, "Has there been much improvement?"

Fenris rolls his shoulders, restless. He respects Cassandra, more than he ought for the woman who hunted Hawke like a rabbit before the Inquisition took form; but there is a straightforwardness to her that he appreciates, a blunt honesty as unlike Kirkwall's endless grey lies as he can imagine. He knows Hawke likes her, certainly; if nothing else her letters had been full of her name, _Cassandra says this_ and _Cassandra believes that_, and in the inverse irony now common since Hawke woke she flinches more at Cassandra's visits than many others.

"A difficult question," he says at last, and fits the wood tray with its carved lid. "A difficult answer."

"I know Dorian is optimistic she will stand within the week."

"Just so."

"But the rest…?"

He does not know what to say. For two weeks Hawke has shied from his touch and laughed in his face, dragged out old wounds from their histories and thrown them at his feet like burning coals; for two weeks she has searched every word he has spoken for a lie. Months she has been dead and mourned as the dead are mourned, and now she _lives_, and he who would have died a thousand times in her place cannot even embrace her without wrenching apart every fear she has.

He is desperate to hold her. Venhedis, his skin cries for it; every near brush makes his fingertips prickle and the lyrium sing, an electric thrum that has him all too aware of every sigh of air and press of heat. Just the night before he had caught her wrist thoughtlessly, stabilizing it when she'd nearly spilled a glass of water across them both, and though he had instantly released the hold she'd let her gaze linger on the place where he had touched her, and then on his face, studying him for something he could not guess to give. He does not know what she read in him, in the pause before he withdrew; he only knows she had not flinched away, and the look in her face had had nothing of fear.

Hope had nearly killed him once before, and yet Hawke lives. If even now, she might…

"The rest is yet to be seen," Fenris says, abruptly aware he has been silent too long. "There is much yet she is not willing to confide in me."

"But more than before? That is a good sign."

"Yes," he tells her, wishing it to be so. "It will be better when Varric comes, I think."

Cassandra nods thoughtfully, then glances at the door behind him. "I was on my way to hear the scouts' reports from the Emerald Graves. Perhaps you'd like to join me?"

"I will," he says, because this too is a painful hope, and leaves the tray behind to go with her.

They find the scouts atop the great wall just outside Cullen's tower, a pair of elvhen women with longbows slung across their backs and green stripes painted across their faces. The company is only a day behind them, they tell Cassandra, a little less depending on how hard they drive their pace. The bandits have been routed, the Graves safe once more; the Chargers will return to Skyhold with no casualties and few injuries aside from a black eye from when Krem took an elbow defending Blackwall's back.

Cassandra dismisses them with her thanks, and as the women go to rest from the road Cassandra jerks her head for Fenris to follow, leading him to another section of wall not as close to Cullen's tower. It is colder here, not so protected from the ice-chipped winds by Skyhold's ancient magic, and Fenris spares a dim wish for the cloak still folded atop his makeshift bed in Hawke's rooms. Cassandra does not even flinch as she braces both hands on a stone crenellation and turns her face into the mountain air.

"Varric does not know," she says eventually, looking back at Fenris. It is more of a question than it should be. "Did the Inquisitor tell you?"

"Yes," he says, and comes to stand stiffly beside her. "She asked last week if I wished to have him brought back ahead of the rest of the party."

"And you did not?"

He shakes his head. "It's not that I did not wish it; I was…preoccupied. Other circumstances kept my attention, and then, once Hawke was well enough to be—trusted," and that's not quite the word he wants, but he can't find another, "I received word they had already begun the return journey here."

Cassandra leans forward on her elbows, her gaze distant. "I was displeased," she admits, "when the Inquisitor decided he ought to be told in person. The magic should not have been attempted without him to begin with."

"There was no choice," Fenris tells her, and that is true, too; Dorian had come to him in a near panic not three days after Varric had left, a handful of scrolls clutched in one hand and an expensive, marked calendar in the other. Every resource of the Inquisition at their disposal, and time the one thing they could no longer spare… "I would have preferred to wait as well, once we knew, but at the time we did not realize how short a window was left. The Kirkwall ambassador's persistence had made him eager to go, and we could not…I could not find reason then for him to stay."

Her eyes cut to him through the wind. "And your argument the night before played no part, then."

He curls his lip, annoyed. He does not wish to remember the violent shouts ringing from the walls of Josephine's office, the sight of nonchalant, imperturbable Varric white-faced and angry, and angry at _him_.

Their griefs had broken against each other, hard and harsh as arctic waves, splintering apart into shards of hoarfrost that clung to the skin and made it salt-bitter. Hawke was dead, Varric had said, surely, the words of his last letter flung back between them like a blade; and even if there had been no conviction in his claiming there had not been hope, either, only a crushed storyteller who knew how perilous it would be to chase a wisp too quickly into the dark.

What was there to be gained by hurrying back without preparation into the most treacherous place they'd ever traveled? What was worth the near-certain loss of four lives—the Inquisitor's life, _Fenris's _life, one of his few true friends remaining—risked so quickly for the shadow of a dream? Cullen had agreed with him then; Fenris had been _furious_, pulse rushing in his ears, impatient at the pretense that this was even worth the argument. He could not even fault the dwarf for the hesitation; he had nothing, after all, not an ounce of proof beyond his own certainty that every second had been precious, so precious—

But Varric had looked up at him, an old, dull anguish behind his eyes like whiskey under glass, and Fenris had remembered the way the edges of that letter had curled upwards, ever-so-slightly wrinkled, and stiff, as if the page had grown damp in the writing.

_Wait,_ he'd said, close enough to pleading Fenris's skin had crawled. _Just wait a little longer, until we're a little more sure. Don't you go and die on me too. _

"My apologies," Cassandra says into the lengthening silence, and Fenris jolts. "That was unkind of me."

He glances her way, but she's sincere even through the creased eyebrows, and when he lowers his shoulders she gives him a small, pale smile. "His worry was not unreasonable," Fenris allows, and fists both hands together atop the wall. "But I had no choice."

"Hm." Cassandra looks down at her empty palms. A pair of guards passes behind them on patrol with quiet salute; as their footfalls fade around the next turn Cassandra rubs one hand carefully over her face and sighs. "My apologies," she says again, and flicks her fingers through her short bangs without disturbing the crowning braid. "I am not trying to pry. It's only—Varric has become important to—all of us, though you may never tell him so—and I am trying to understand. If I knew something like this had been kept from me, even for a little while, I would be furious. Is it that you fear he will be angry?"

"No," Fenris says slowly, "not precisely. But…he was hurt when Hawke died, and he will hurt more now that she is alive. There is nothing he can do to further hasten his journey home, and for these few days at least I would…" he gestures helplessly into the air. "I would keep a friend from pain."

Cassandra blows out a breath, then leans forward on her elbows again. "Because he was the one who brought the Champion here, with his letters. He was the one who told her of Corypheus."

Fenris is silent. Below them, a boy in blue and yellow gives the tiny breakfast bells set outside the barracks a vigorous shake; from the great hall a larger, more ponderous set begin their own brassy calls for those awake to care.

The strongest reason. Not the only one, no—he is enough aware of his own shortcomings to know where he is selfish—but if Hawke had been well from the start, or if there had been even the slightest chance Varric's presence might have done Hawke good, Fenris would have been on the messenger's horse himself. But Hawke had woken mad instead, a violent mistrust in every word and demons' scars peppered down her throat, and he had feared that if Varric had seen her in such a state, this dim, twisted shadow of all she once had been, he would not have been the same again. Already the dwarf took on too much guilt; already he took as shield for his heart the certainty that Hawke was dead. To be proven wrong, to know she had been left there for months while he did nothing…

The shock will be great enough as it is. At least this way there is hope Hawke might smile rather than strike when she sees him.

But as much as Fenris respects Cassandra, this is beyond what he can readily share. "Only a day's ride," he says instead. "And then we will see."

"I will pray for Varric, then. And the Champion's health, as always." The breakfast bells ring again; Cassandra glances to the sun's position, then at the yard. "I fear if you do not return soon, the Champion's breakfast will be claimed as spoils of war. There are many stirring this morning."

He inclines his head. "Seeker."

"Serah," she says, and lifts a hand in farewell as he turns toward the kitchens and leaves her standing on the wall, alone. Her words settle over his shoulders, a heavy a weight as the cloak he left behind—but there is breakfast to fetch, and a Champion who watches for his return, and even after everything else so far, every unsure, jolting step forward and stumbling half-step back, there is nothing he can do but wait.


	7. Chapter 7

**Recommended listening:** undir by Olafur Arnalds (watch?v=DU6rbkSG1PI) for the first section, and 3055 by the same (watch?v=K6u5D-5LWSg) for the second section.

* * *

NOT knowing when the dawn will come  
I open every door;  
Or has it feathers like a bird,  
Or billows like a shore?  
—Emily Dickinson

—

Hawke wakes up.

Even before she opens her eyes, she can tell Fenris is not in the room. That she has become so attuned to his presence has faded to only a minor annoyance; what surprises her more is that he'd been gone when she fell asleep, too, over an hour ago by the late afternoon sun through her tall window. It's the first time he's been away so long since she woke in this world.

How dangerous, she wonders, is admitting to herself that she misses him?

"Flames," she says aloud, as much to disrupt the silence as the sentiment, and after smothering the impulse to reach for a staff no longer there, takes the moment to throw back the green covers and stretch both feet as far as she can.

Helista had come earlier, and Dorian and Vivienne as well, to remove the splint from her right knee. A novel freedom—few demons have ever cared to take her all the way through the healing, much less give her the dream of walking once more—and it's one Hawke will not waste, even if they'd left her with firm instructions to leave anything more than standing for a few days yet. The splint on her left leg remains, though it's been reduced to a few close-strapped wooden rods instead of the wreath of metal pins from before, and her left hand still sports a plaster cast over her whole palm and wrist, but—

Maker, she hardly hurts at all.

She is, however, hungry, and stifles the initial panic at the thought as soon as she spies the plate Fenris has left for her. A little thing he has done since the first day; no matter when she wakes, there has always been food somewhere near at hand, even if it's only a handful of grapes and a chunk of white cheese. Today, though, it's a cup of cold leek soup and a stack of watercress sandwiches, a half-glass of white wine and a cup of tea long gone cold.

So grateful she can't find the words for it; and she doesn't try, instead setting about the food until it is reduced to crumbs. She's long lost track of these small kindnesses he keeps doing for her, anyway. Easier to do when he's not here, if she's honest with herself; just this morning he'd been steadying her as she'd changed her sweat-stained nightshirt for a proper set of clean clothes, the first since she woke in this dream, the first since Dorian had lessened her restrictions. Somewhere between the lavender-colored cambric settling around her hips and the knotting of the leather laces at her waist she'd overbalanced, and Fenris's arm had come around her waist to steady her in the same instant she'd gripped his shirt to keep from falling.

She'd looked up, and he'd been—_there_, right there, nose to nose and so close she could feel his sharp inhale. Green eyes, so green—the moss in a forest—and his lips had parted, and she could hardly be blamed if her attention had refocused there like lightning down her spine. Too thin, she'd thought once, that first day this side of the mirror, but now she wonders if she hadn't—if perhaps she hadn't after all…

His hand had tightened at the small of her back. She'd flinched, just barely, and between one breath and the next his eyes had shuttered again, and he had stepped away, and he had let her go.

And Andraste help her, she'd wanted nothing more than to reach for him again.

A bird cries out just outside her window, loud enough to startle her. She can't see the kind, just a flash of grey and the beat of wings—and then there's a knock on the door, and she sets down the cup of tea in her lap.

"Come in!" Hawke calls, and patiently waits out the tiny voice in the back of her head that screams at her choice of words. She should care more, she _knows_, but…

Fenris enters, his hair a shock of white in the clear afternoon sunlight. She smiles to see it, smiles too at the unadulterated pleasure she feels at his return. He's not smiling, not quite, but his eyes are bright, and there's an anticipation in his step she likes very much for no reason at all she can discern.

"I wondered where you went," Hawke says, gesturing at the empty plate. "The sandwiches were delicious. Thank you."

"Of course." He comes to the side of the bed, back in that new dark blue tunic that fits him so well, though he's shucked the boots for the day. "My apologies for the delay. Cullen was telling me he has found the Warden camp where your brother is stationed, and he has asked for him to be given leave to make the journey to Skyhold."

She'll believe it when she sees it—and perhaps not even then—but she can't deny the jolt in her stomach. "Is that so?"

"Yes. Hawke," he says, and from his face she knows he'd take her hand here if she'd permit it, "I have brought someone to see you."

"Someone interesting, I hope."

"You must judge that for yourself," he tells her, striding back to the door. The handle clicks, the rehung hinges swinging soundlessly, and there—

"_Varric_," Hawke says, and puts a hand to her heart where it hurts.

He looks—_perfect_.

In terrible shape, yes, deep purple bruises under his eyes, his coat torn at the hem from some errant blade, his gloves stained from hard travel—but oh, he is _right_, like coming home to a hearthfire already roaring welcome. His eyes are so warm, even creased with worry; the tail of his sandy hair is just the right shade of gold. She knows he is only—she knows—she _knows_; but _oh_, how's she's missed him.

There's a ripple down his expression as he looks at her, like a candle seen through the veil of a little waterfall, and then he blows out a short, hard breath.

"Well, shit, Hawke," he says, and even though his voice trembles there's a smile in it so broad she can't help but respond in kind. "What am I supposed to do with my eulogy now?"

"Did you spend very much time on it?"

"Too much," he vows, and that's too near the truth for both of them, and then she's opening her arms despite herself and he's come to meet her as fast as his legs will take him.

Flames, he even _smells _right. Leather and ink and crossbow oil, and damn her to the Void if this isn't the realest she's felt since Fenris dragged her out of that damned mirror. "Varric," she says into his shoulder, because she must say something, and he shudders. "Where the blazes have you been?"

His broad hands tighten on her back. "The Emerald Graves," he says, and she can feel the shake of his head. "Helping Tiny flush out a few camps of bandits who keep insisting on making the nearby villages miserable."

"Noble work."

"Always, when Bianca and I are involved." His voice is steady, but her shoulder is suspiciously wet, and when he at last pulls back to hold her at arm's length, his eyes are red. "You look terrible," he says frankly.

She _laughs_, delighted, and how long has it been? "Thank you, you horrible dwarf."

"No shit. If this is what dreams do, I'm glad dwarves don't get any."

"I'll happily give you my share next time."

"Pass," he says, and takes the chair without letting go of her hands. He's still got on his gloves, warm, red-brown calfskin with new diamond-shaped tooling along the cuffs, and somehow that little detail gives her more comfort than anything else so far. "I didn't believe it, Hawke."

"That I was dead?"

"That you were alive," he admits bluntly. He's kind when he says it, and his grip is gentle, but it's still a blow. "Fenris met me at the gates just now. I saw his face…we'd been talking of ways to find you for months, but I didn't think there'd be anything at the end of the road but memories. Hawke," he says again, and his voice cracks. "It's good you're alive. Damn. Let me look at you."

She swallows, letting him give her a thorough once-over in the silence. Belatedly, she wishes she'd combed her hair, or wiped the sleep from her eyes; his gaze doesn't even trip over the marks on her neck, but a faint embarrassment rises all the same by the time he makes it back to her face. For all that she hasn't cared for weeks somehow it—it _matters_, desperately, that he think well of her here, and not only because he might be—might be more than a dream, but because Varric has always seen through to her roots, and if he can bear what she's become perhaps she can as well.

Maker, how she's missed him. A hole in her heart, mending…

"Shit," he says again, and his gloved thumb passes over the back of her knuckles. "A pulse and everything. I couldn't sell this no matter how I tried. No one would believe it."

"A Fereldan heart's a stubborn thing," she says, throat tight. "Couldn't stop it even if I wanted."

He sees through _that_, of course. She watches the smile hitch, the understanding and the hurt flash behind the gladness in his eyes; watches as he leans forward to hold her gaze, the soft creak of leather giving way with his wonderful wide warmth. "Now that's a wound that'll take a little longer to lance," he says softly. "And I'll be here to help when you do, if you want me. Won't even publish the notes."

"Varric…"

He smiles, his hands tightening around hers as his eyes begin to shine once more. She wants to say _something_, but he shakes his head, a wonder in his face that breaks her heart, and then he bends over her gripped hands, clutching them to his own forehead. He holds her there against him, silent, so hard her fingers ache.

There's a lump in her throat so thick she doesn't think she can speak around it. She watches the top of Varric's head for a moment, blinking back her own tears; and because she's hurting and heartsore and her soul knows better balms than her mind, her gaze slides thoughtlessly, effortlessly, to Fenris.

He still stands by the door, arms crossed. It's a loose stance, though, his shoulders low and easy, one heel propped up against the stone wall, and he is smiling. At Varric, and at her: open, proud, and glad. She hasn't seen him so glad since…

But her fingers hurt and this does nothing for the hug she truly wants to give Varric, so she disentangles herself just long enough to put her arms around his wide dwarven shoulders and pull him as close as she can through the awkward bedside twist. "I missed you," she gets out, the words breaking despite every effort. "Every day, I thought about walking into the Hanged Man and seeing you holding court at that long table in front of the fireplace one more time."

He laughs through the tears, a puff into her hair. "What's a court without its jester?"

"Ass," she says, and clenches her eyes shut. "Flames and _pyre_, Varric. When this goes to pieces—"

"It won't."

"You sound like Merrill," she says, a bit damp herself, and drops her head onto his wonderful shoulder before pulling back at last. The voice in the back of her head is panicked now, shrieking at what she's about to say, but Varric is warm and wide and _here_, and she's about to fall apart. "Varric, I don't want to let this go."

"You won't have to." He squeezes her hands, then drops the most gentlemanly kiss she's ever seen him give on her knuckles. "Rogue's honor."

"When you say it like that, I almost believe it."

"Just give it time." He squeezes her fingers once more before letting her go at last, and then pushes up from the chair. "Listen. There's a few things I have to do; I left the pony standing in the middle of the yard and Bianca's still hooked to the pommel, and I still smell like cave lichen. Give me a few hours and I'll be back, and I expect to hear the full story—from both of you," he adds, throwing an ominous look at Fenris, "especially since you went without me. Wait here, Hawke. I'll be back."

Will he? Somehow she trusts he will; somehow she wants more to tell him of every dream and nightmare she's had since the moment she looked at the Inquisitor's back in the Fade and watched the rift seal shut behind her. Not only because Varric knows how to listen better than most—although that is true as well—but because there's a storyteller's heart in him stronger than anyone she's ever known, and if anyone in this world can remake the shattered grotesquerie of her history here into something with a softer shape, into something she can bear to carry, it is Varric.

His expression has shifted again to something quiet, something still as he watches her watch him, and when at last she lets out a breath and nods he gives her a grin, real and _right_, and the gold at his ear gleams in the sunlight.

"All right," she says, and lets the grief slip free.

Fenris closes the door behind him, smiling still as Varric's footsteps fade down the stairs beyond. Hawke can't help but be annoyed at his obvious satisfaction, but it's a tender thing despite herself, and she props her chin in both hands. "You're very pleased about all of this," she says.

He inclines his head, the smile unwavering as he comes to the window nearest her. On the sill rests a plate of apples in cinnamon glaze, and a small bowl of candied almonds gone warm and sticky in the sun; he brings them both to the bed and sits gingerly on its edge. "He was eager to see you. I thought perhaps it would help, no more."

"You knew he was coming and you didn't say _anything_."

"There was some question of when he would arrive."

She laughs, throwing back her head. "Oh, you smug—couldn't you have given a girl a warning? I might have been—naked, I don't know, or in the middle of some incoherent raving, which would have been more embarrassing, honestly."

A faint, intolerable smirk. "I did come first to make sure all was well."

"_Bastard_," she says, grinning, and before she can stop herself she pops one of the almonds into Fenris's mouth.

There's a short, stunned silence.

It's the first time. The first time she's touched him of her own free will since the mirror, certainly in any gentleness, and yet she can't bear to pull away; his eyes have gone huge and dark as he stares at her, mirth forgotten, her fingertips still brushing over his lips.

Hawke sucks in a breath. She should—_my magic will serve me_—but instead her fingers slip along his bottom lip, and down his chin, so faint the lyrium leaves a little river-trail of light behind where she passes, and then a slow turn up the line of his jaw.

Fenris does not move a muscle. In fact, she's not entirely sure he's breathing; he hasn't even blinked, that devastating green enough to spellbind her here in the quiet of this light-filled room. She hesitates—then in a rush of boldness she flattens her palm to his cheek.

He shudders, a bone-deep thing.

"Fenris," she says. His eyes are so wide—

And then the door explodes inwards in a tempest of yelps and muddy fur, and the moment is wholly broken under the weight of a mabari tackling the bed like a loosed cannon.

"_Toby_," Hawke gasps, laughing, delighted, and her dog, her _dog_ leaps into her lap as if he could fit in her hands again, the whole bed shaking under the force of his stumped tail's wagging. It's all barking after that, and spilled almonds and face-licks and muddy pawprints _everywhere_, and Cassandra come chasing up through the open door after him, red-cheeked as she scolds him for his escape, only to be nearly bowled over by Blackwall and Bull and Krem leading the whole of the Chargers behind. Hawke catches Fenris's eye once through the chaos, whatever left of that moment shattered all to nothing, but he's smiling again, fond and clear, and she can't help but smile back.

There is, she thinks abruptly, time.

—

"Hawke." A whisper in her ear, soft, beloved. "Hawke, wake up."

She does, though it's reluctant as a boulder pulled uphill, and cracks an eye from her very comfortable pillow to see Fenris kneeling on the bed beside her. Fully dressed too, boots and all, and a heavy dark cloak over one shoulder, though she can barely make it out in the dim grey pre-dawn light.

"Fenris," she croaks, and buries her face in the pillow again. "The sun isn't even up."

He laughs, a quiet thing that ripples down her heart, and brushes the barest touch over her shoulder. "I know. Get up. I will help you."

"Help me into an early grave," she grouses, but doesn't fight back when he pulls the covers away to the shock of cold mountain air. "Five hundred steps, Dorian said. No more."

"I will help you," he says again, and drops a wool cloak over her shoulders instead.

It's got a good smell to it, a clean, wintry cut, and though her obdurate body fights every inch she pushes herself to a sitting position, and then to her feet. Fenris helps her dress quickly in a heavy tunic and grey trousers; even now he touches her no more than is strictly necessary for her balance, or for a tie her casted hand can't quite yet manage, and at the last he brings her a pair of black leather boots tall enough to reach her knees. "Reinforced, as well," he says, carefully guiding her left foot into the first. "Dorian believes it will take some of the stress from where your bones are still mending."

"I bet Dorian would let me go back to sleep," she tells him tartly, and bites back the gasp when she turns stiff ankles too sharp against the ache. "It's all right. Give me a moment."

He does, though he glances more than once at the paling sky through her window until she is at last ready, both feet booted, the cloak knotted tight at her left shoulder. "Come with me," he says, his eyes bright.

_…that which is best in me._

"All right," she says, and follows him through the door.

The first wooden stairs from her room to the great hall are trying, but not so difficult as she had feared. Still, her knuckles are white on the bannister, her knees—unsplinted all of three days—as reliable as rubber. Fenris goes first, half-turned and ready to catch her if she falls, but she makes it to the bottom unscathed, if a little sore.

"_Ha!_" she crows, triumphant, just in time to trip on a cracked board in the middle of nothing. Fenris steadies her on the stumble—not even near to falling, though the embarrassment's enough for healthy chagrin, and lets go the moment she waves him away. "Never mind. Lead on."

She keeps her eyes to her feet after that. It's excruciatingly slow going, especially given her need to palm a wall for her own steadiness, but Fenris doesn't complain once, just keeps pace with her as they edge through the empty, silent great hall and out its enormous doors at the far end, one of them cracked just enough for the two of them to squeeze through. Even the heavy outdoor torches here have burned down to embers as the night has waned, not yet refreshed by the guards changing with the dawn shift.

It's a long walk for whatever it is Fenris has planned, at least three hundred steps, surely, and by the end of the second outdoor flight of stairs, the one that takes them down from the great hall's doors to the yard's grassy brownstone path, she is flagging badly.

"A moment, just a moment," she gets out, breathing hard, and leans on the capstone at the bottom of the stairs to hide her trembling knees. "Though—perhaps—how much farther?"

"A ways yet," he says, and begins to hold out his hand before letting it fall to his side again. "I will help you."

"You've said _that _before," she grumbles, but she pushes away from the capstone and follows him once more.

_Eyes on your feet. Careful, careful—your body knows this rhythm, walking, one foot in front of the other, knees bending and straightening again, stop thinking and let it do the work._ Black-booted toes on grass-choked cobbles, still early enough no sun has risen to cast a shadow. Dewdrops glittering along vine-leaves of wild honeysuckle twining along the stacked stone wall that lines the path; a little chill in the air the further they go from the hold proper, just sharp enough to bite. The boot-leather dampens at the toes, darkens, and Hawke is so preoccupied with the change that she runs right into Fenris's back.

"Oh," she says, and looks past him to the rounded wood door to one of Skyhold's great corner towers—and all the stairs that lie behind it. "_Oh_."

Fenris has turned to look at her, waiting, nothing in his eyes but that same stern brightness and an unending patience. He opens the door with one hand and lets it fall back into the dimness; the stone stairs that circle the walls inside look back at her just as patiently, ready for her choice.

"Well," Hawke says at last, blowing out a sigh that stirs her hair, "you'd better help me, then."

A flicker of a smile, a flicker of—hope, perhaps—and then her arm is around his shoulders and he grips her waist. Five hundred steps—but she lost count long ago, and there's nothing she can do now but appreciate the weight and warmth of Fenris pressed along her side, his arm around her back, his feet as sure and steady as a rock to counterpoint her hopeless fumbling.

She can smell him. Maker, it's a line right to her soul: his leathers, the cedar oil he likes for his hair, the faint burn of lyrium over something strong and deep as earth. The tiny voice cries in the back of her head—be careful, be _careful_—but she has been careful for so long, so _long_, and she's forgotten if she wants to kiss Fenris because he looks enough like him it doesn't matter or because he might be _real_, and damn the rest.

Her knees buckle halfway up the stairs. Her heart's already racing, pushed past endurance after three weeks of bed rest; Fenris's other hand comes to the backs of her thighs and the world dips and—

"Don't tell Varric," she wheezes, laughing, and buries her head in his neck.

She can feel him smile. He carries her the rest of the way without apparent effort—and she knows she's gone bone-thin, but it's so cataclysmically _unfair_—and then the door at the top of the stairs creaks open, protesting its swing into the world, and a wall of ice-cold air lashes her right out of every pleasant daydream she's ever dared indulge in.

"Flames," she hisses through teeth abruptly chattering. "You _did _bring me here to kill me. Maker, it's _cold_—and while I'm complaining like a fishwife, you might have brought me my—well, _any_ staff if we were going to go up all those burning stairs—"

"Hawke," Fenris says, laughing again, and eases her to her feet again. She can almost feel the stone's chill through her boots, and she's about to say so when a heavy hearth-warmed quilt drops around her shoulders over the cloak. "Bear it for a few minutes."

"I can bear a lot," she points out, though she pulls the quilt closer around her shoulders gratefully. His hair really has gotten long, she thinks, and before she can stop herself she reaches to thumb the end of the braid where it rests on his collarbone. A little light in the sky now, the world not so grey as it was before, enough to catch and flare on a few loose strands to scald them silver.

"Hawke," he murmurs, and her stomach flips. "I brought you here for a reason."

"Did you?" she says absently. There's something about the texture of his hair, something so familiar…

"Look," he breathes, and takes her by the shoulders, and turns her to the dawn.

The dawn—

The sun has begun to rise over the mountains. So many mountains, just now lipped in the early edge of pale rose, all tall as the sky and rippling down from the walls of Skyhold as if they will never end. A wind picks up to their right, soughing through a stand of pines like a home-won whisper; as she watches, its stolen needles dance in the air a moment or two before the wind tumbles away from them down the length of the battlements, down the mountains, whipping snow-froth from its peaks into white mist that glitters in the air, and hangs there, and dies away. A flock of black birds lifts from behind some great rock and scatters into the sky, then forms again and wheels down into the distant trees with a cry; and then in the space between one half-breath and the next the sun has _risen_ all at once, has stained all the snow pink and gold and lined the world in light.

So enormous. This whole world spread out before her at her feet, unending, craggy snow-choked rocks and broken trunks marking the places where snow has fallen too heavy before, and will again. Below them a narrow path cuts back and forth down the mountain's face, carved into it like the edge of a knife, here dipping into shadow, here emerging again into the dawn, and on the edge of the far treeline she can see the faintest mark of movement where a guardsman's horse might go. She had forgotten. She had forgotten there could be—so _much_—

"Hawke," Fenris says behind her, his hands on her shoulders, and she is shuddering, shuddering— "I know I do not understand what you have seen. I know there are things in the Fade that are so real they cannot be unrooted, but I spoke with Cullen and—tell me," and now she can hear the unsteadiness in his voice, the hitch in his chest as he draws in a breath. "There is stone under your feet, and it is real. And the ice in the wind, and the birds moving before the clouds, and the mountain snow."

She closes her eyes. Stone under her feet…

"There are gardeners in the yard behind you. Can you hear them? And Cassandra has come to train as she does each morning." And yes, she can hear that too, the sound of leather creaking with a warrior's morning stretches, the low sigh as she centers herself before each strike, the higher _hah!_ as a wooden sword thunks hollowly against straw and pine. And behind that the gardeners in the Inquisition's rows, murmuring amongst themselves as they harvest elfroot and prophet's laurel, as they pluck berries from the bushes and check the leaves for rust.

This is the first time she's left that room with the green duvet. She hadn't even realized. So ready to go with Fenris where he asked, and something in her already so willing to believe this place might be the same as the one she left, so ready to not feel a step or a twig out of place, not a single doubt in her heart as she left the doors of the great hall behind and walked out into the day.

"Hawke," Fenris says, and his hands tighten. There is such a naked hope in his voice— "Are there creatures in the Fade so strong?"

No demon could do this. Not a thousand demons.

But—

"Let me—" she starts, and the words stumble on the leaving so that she must try again, "Let me see your hands."

His bare fingers slip down her shoulders, then lower to reach in front of her. She hesitates, steeling herself—if this is wrong, she will throw herself from the battlements and be done with all of it—and then she takes his wrists and turns them so that his palms face upwards.

His hands are trembling. She smoothes her thumbs over his palms, watching the lyrium-light trail after her touch, warm in the gold dawn. All this time, all this time and it's been right here to see…

Hawke kisses the calluses that run broad across his right hand.

At the base of every finger, and heavy at his thumb where he grasps the hilt of his sword; and on his other hand, too, a kiss for every roughened fingertip, until he turns her abruptly in his arms and cups her face in both hands. His eyes are so green, and afraid, and terrible with hope. Oh, _oh_, but how has he waited—how has he waited this long for her?

"Hawke," he says, his throat working on the words, "If you choose a way, I will take a horse and walk with you in that direction until we reach the sea, if that is what it will take for you to believe this world is real."

She presses a hand over his to keep it on her cheek; her thumb skips over crimson silk, knotted tight around his wrist. Her chest is so tight she can hardly breathe.

"If you tell me to go and not return, I will do that too, though it will kill me. If you lived well—if you knew you were awake, that would be enough."

"Fenris," she says, and her voice is scarcely her own, so thick is it with grief, "if you take one more step without me on these battlements, I will haunt you until the ends of the earth."

A smile flickers over his face, brief and bare, but his eyebrows are still pinched taut enough to crease, and his jaw is hard as iron. She lifts her free hand and runs her fingers the length of it, deliberately now, no accident, and turns at his chin to trace the shape of his face.

This full, dear mouth. Perhaps the right shape after all. Perhaps—perhaps the same it has always been, even with his lips pressed tight together.

And perhaps his nose—right, too, after all, long and straight and with the proud bridge between his brows, now gone furrowed with the history of weeks—months—too long, too _long_. She presses her fingers gently between them, smoothing out the grooves until his eyes close and he lets out a shallow sigh. Perhaps her home has been no further than an armslength from her all along.

"But your eyes were always perfect," she whispers, and has all the good fortune of watching them open to fix on her like nothing else in the world might ever matter again.

"Hawke," Fenris breathes, a light in his face as sure and strong as the sunlight leaping over the mountains behind him, dazzling and brilliant and alive and _true_, and then, "_avis mea._"

She shudders. "I didn't think—" she starts, all her words a tangle of sorrow and unfettered joy—and that tight thing in her chest is swelling, hot as a star, and her eyes _burn_, "that I would ever hear you call me that again."

"If I had thought you would allow it," he begins, and then his eyes clench shut and he bends forward until his marked forehead presses hard against her own. "Hawke, I—"

This is too far away. She has been here so long—and a thousand worlds between them, and this is _too far away_. She grips his collar in both hands, pulling herself against him on legs that still can't quite do what she asks. The quilt falls away in a little heap and is forgotten, and Fenris's arms come hard around her back until her breath sighs out in a rush.

"Hawke," he says into her ear, low, urgent. "If I gave you my word that this was not the Fade, that you are safe and this is _real_, would you believe me?"

Hawke smiles, and somehow it carries the weight with it when it goes, a thousand thin strands of spider-white silk snapped at last, weightless, effortless. "Do you know," she says, "I would?"

He laughs, a startled, winded sound, and pulls back just enough so that he can see her. One hand lifts, thumbing down the round white scars that mark her throat—and will forever, she supposes, now that she's awake—and then he takes her face in both hands, his thumbs along her cheekbones and his warm fingers curled around her jaw, his eyes wide and earnest and eager—

An instant's hesitation, right at the last moment. Still so unsure if he is wanted.

She waits, wondering—but the voice in the back of her head has gone wholly silent at last. Vanished now, uprooted and torn away, and she is more than ready for the new and silent growth that must come after.

"Kiss me, damn you," Hawke breathes against his mouth, and he does.

How stupid, that something so gentle could break her heart so easily. And yet here she is, kissing Fenris—kissing _Fenris_, real and breathing and who has waited for her longer than anyone ought to ever have to wait in their lives, Fenris whose mouth is so warm and familiar on hers she might cry.

And she does, a little, when his grip shifts so that his arms can come properly around her shoulders to hold her as close as he can, when the fingers of one hand slide into her hair and clutch the back of her head to bring her closer still. It's all she can manage to keep herself upright; she's got one hand fisted in the collar of his cloak and the other at the nape of his braid, and somehow between her grip and his adept support her knees stay strong enough to bear her up even through their trembling.

The lyrium sings under her skin, faint and perfectly Fenris, and she turns her head for a better angle against his mouth. He laughs against her lips, surprised, pleased; she smiles into the kiss and deepens it all at once, reveling in the little shiver he gives before he responds in kind, tightening the hand in her hair and walking her a step or two in reverse until a crenellation digs into her back.

"Shit," she gasps, and then his mouth seals open and _hard_ over hers and there's nothing else to be said. She can't get close enough; her knee slips between his, his weight against her chest to thigh and his taste in her mouth mingling with the taste of salt, his or hers, and it's _still _not—

She shifts until she can wrap both arms around his neck. He makes a low noise deep in his throat—_glorious—_and her cloak has bunched at her back under his arm and it is _Fenris_, this dear, perfect man she's missed so desperately for so long, and this whole time he's been right beside her, ready, waiting only for her to turn and look at him once more. She's drowning in the taste of him, the smell; she doesn't know how in a thousand years she could have ever thought herself cold.

Eventually, just before she thinks her heart must burst, Fenris drags in air against her mouth, drags himself away the barest inch to speak.

"I am yours, Hawke," he says, his voice low and uneven, and it's almost enough to have her yanking him back again if it weren't for how dearly she's missed his smile. Even like this—_especially _like this, his lips swollen and flushed, high color on his cheeks, his eyes deliciously hectic in the pale gleaming of new dawn. Even the lyrium has gone off all over, sparks chasing up and down his throat and arms, bright traces even through his heavy sleeves to send wonderful frissons through her fingertips.

"_Fenris_," she says, as much for the pleasure of it as the reminder. "What, you won't have me right here on the wall?"

He laughs, startled, and laughs again, and leans forward until his head rests in the curve of her neck. He's breathing as hard as she is; at least she has the bedrest for an excuse. "Perhaps another time."

"Don't make promises you can't keep." She means it lightly, but it comes out with more anxiety than she would like. "Fenris…"

"Yes?"

"You'll have to remind me. Sometimes, when it's—I'm sorry. I can already tell. There might be times you'll—where you might have to tell me again."

He kisses the side of her neck below her ear, and then her cheek, and the center of her forehead. "As many times as it takes."

She is awake. After all this time, she _is_…

_Awake._

"I believe you," she says, because she does, and his wonderful callused thumb sweeps across her cheek to wipe the tears away.


	8. Chapter 8

**Recommended listening:** Ljósið by Olafur Arnalds (watch?v=mYIfiQlfaas), and Reuben's Train (watch?v=IGS8SR4Mu34) performed by by Mack Jonsson for the feast.

* * *

And to you I hope that this life will make you think festively of the wonder of being alive.  
—_The Pope's Daughter_, Dario Fo, tr. Antony Shugaar

—

It's a novel thing, having Hawke in the great hall for meals, but the look on her face when the servants bring out the main course is enough that it's all worth it.

"Stuffed capons!" Hawke exclaims, then immediately looks so guilty it puts her dog to shame. "Oh, flames. Oh, Maker, I'd forgotten. I'm _sorry_."

Priory laughs—really laughs, so hard tears spring to the corners of her eyes. "It's a festive occasion. A celebration, and you're the guest of honor. What else could we do?"

"Not like this," Hawke says, obviously mortified, and watches the serving dishes array themselves around her: stuffed capons, and pork in wine sauce—and scones and spiced jelly, and stewed apples with mint and cinnamon, and elderflower tartlets in a decorative stack at her elbow, iced in sugar. The silver-polished platters gleam in the light of the torches and the last hour of sunset, a heavy amber glow dripping like honey from every shining surface. "I don't even remember half the things I said anymore. How many apologies do I owe?"

Leliana leans forward, a little spear of apple on her fork. "It has been too long since there was cause for celebration like this in Skyhold. No apologies are necessary, please."

"I'm happy to be the excuse for a feast, if it comes to that."

"It does, even if it is a small one. Right, Josie?"

Josephine smiles, her napkin turned just so in her lap. "A wider announcement might have been more beneficial to the Inquisition, but I suppose an intimate gathering of friends is just as appropriate. I am very glad to see you looking so well, Champion."

"Indeed, one more tartlet and I might snap the chair's spindles beneath me."

Priory laughs again, as does the rest of the table. Hawke is hardly at risk of chair-snapping yet; even now she's barely able to fill out the shoulders of her shirt, and the sleeves still hang far too loose. But there's a life in her Priory hasn't seen since before Adamant, and somehow that fire seems to make her larger than she is. Varric leans over and whispers something into Hawke's ear; she grins, shaking her head, and pulls a face at Sera at the other end of the table. Sera snorts and flicks a blackberry back, and when Hawke ducks it bounces instead off the table to come to rest by Vivienne's plate. An icy arch of Vivienne's brow, a stifled snort from Sera, and Priory covers her mouth, desperately trying to hide her mirth.

How long _has _it been? All of them here like this at one meal, the Iron Bull exchanging stories of Seheron with Fenris, Blackwall and Dorian entranced by Merrill's tale of some Dalish hero who was once turned into a white rose. Cassandra trying to hide that she's sneaking scraps to Toby beneath the table, and Cole crouched at one end of the bench, smiling beatifically at them all.

_You found the window_, he'd told Hawke as she'd carefully made her way to the table, and beamed.

Eventually, though, plates are reduced to scone crumbs and the faint smearings of wine sauce, the sunset gives way to twilight and flickering candelabra, and tables are pushed back to make way for the musicians. Nothing elaborate, at Hawke's request; only a trio of fiddlers, one of whom still wears her medic's apron; a pair of flautists from Cullen's lieutenants; and a piper Priory knows to be a superb shot with a longbow. The doors at the end of the hall are thrown open as the musicians spend a few minutes in discordant tuning—Hawke's request also, that any celebrations after the feast be open to anyone willing to dance for the rest—and soon enough the hall is filled with cheerful voices and open laughter, smiles flashing quick and bright in the evening torches. Then the music strikes up with a lively Fereldan line dance in homage, and the hall gives a great shout of appreciation.

Priory leans back against the wall, the stone blessedly cool on the back of her neck, and smiles into a glass of white wine. Sera has already taken the head of the line with Dagna, whooping as she stamps in and out of the twisting arms and reaches for Dagna once more. Dorian stands with Bull and Cullen at the opposite wall, not directly in the dance's line but not disapproving either; his black and gold half-cloak, draped over one arm, ripples like water as he gives a little wave in acknowledgement of Priory's look and smiles. Cullen follows his gesture and smiles too when he sees her, his head dipping in a way that makes her heart flip.

And Hawke…

A fistful of sand for how hard she is to pin down, standing now with Blackwall and her mabari at the little table of cheese and crackers, gesturing animatedly in the retelling of some story; moving now across the room to take Vivienne's proffered fingers in open gratitude, gesturing at the thin wrap around her palm, the only remnant left of the great plaster cast. Now dancing forward to catch Fenris by both hands and tug him like a bowed green sapling into the line of partners, laughing at the token resistance before he yields, leading him effortlessly through a handful of steps before letting him withdraw and take her with him, a smile on his face as broad as Priory has yet seen. She smiles again reflexively, so glad for them her heart hurts, and tips her head back into the last swallows of wine.

"Her Inquisitorialness not up for dancing tonight?"

Priory looks down to see Varric at her elbow, his arms crossed beneath a knowing grin. "Why?" she asks, setting the empty glass on a passing server's tray. "Are you offering, perhaps?"

"Perhaps later. I never dance on a full stomach."

She shakes her head, smiling, and rests her head back against the wall. "I'll let that be my excuse as well, then."

"Go right ahead. Actually," he says, and there's a note in the tone now of something more serious, something that chases out the faint tingle of wine as if it had never been, "I came to thank you."

"Oh?"

"For going to get Hawke."

"_Oh_," Priory says awkwardly. Her fingers twist into the sides of her beige trousers as she straightens. "I didn't…there wasn't anything else I could have done. I mean, once Fenris…"

She dares a glance in his direction only to find him smiling back, wry and a bit wistful. He says, "The elf can be persuasive when he puts his mind to it. He's got the spikes to manage the intimidation, anyway."

"I couldn't _not_," she says again, helpless.

"Oh, I think you could, if you thought about it long enough to be sensible. A dead woman's elvhen lover with ridiculous dreams, no proof beyond his own certainty they were anything more than wishful thinking, with every reason to hate you and everything you stand for." Varric pauses, dragging in a breath that hitches, and his gaze turns out to the dancers, moved now with the musicians into something smoother and more Orlesian. "An elf who wanted you to hunt down dangerous mages in the middle of an entire ocean—" and Priory automatically finds Merrill in the crowd, who fumbles a bit with her soup spoon in the return wave, "and bring them to the heart of a secret mountain stronghold to build ancient, impossible magic that no one believed would work."

"Fenris did."

"Fenris did," Varric says, voice steady. "And you, and Sparkler and Daisy, and maybe the kid. Not everyone was so sure."

She swallows. "I thought the magic would work. I didn't think—I didn't think Hawke would be alive when we found her."

That honesty _hurts_, like an icy stone in her gut, but Varric only nods as if he already knew. "Hurts less that way," he murmurs, half to himself, then visibly shakes off the melancholy. "The elf and I have an understanding now, but I can't pretend there won't be regrets from this. Still, if _he's_ willing to forgive me, it stands to rights you should have no trouble forgiving yourself. So says the kid, anyway, each time he catches me trying to ponder."

"You're ridiculous," she says, laughing, because he is and he knows it, and his smirk tells her he's aware of just how much weight she will carry from this room. Less than it was, perhaps, but also not a burden she minds bearing anymore. "Perhaps it's a good thing we had to go without you. The two of us would have spent so much time feeling sorry for ourselves we wouldn't have gotten _anywhere_."

He chuckles, warm and low and comforting as Varric has been since the beginning of their friendship, but his eyes are strained now, old lines deepening at the corners. "Thank you, Lady Trevelyan. You didn't have to risk everything to bring the dead back to life," and he winks, even through the grief, "but you brought back one of the only friends I've got. So. Thanks."

"Varric," Priory says, her throat tight. "I hope you know how sorry I am. For how long—for how long you had to wait. How long _she_ had to wait."

The corner of his mouth turns up, but he only crosses his arms and turns to prop one booted foot on the stone wall beside her. The torchlight glitters over the gold at his ear, at his throat; his eyes on Hawke across the hall are warmer yet. "You found her before it was too late, you and the elf. There's no rush for the rest. We'll take our time."

_She made her choices because she knew who stood beside her._

Like the pinched bud of a marigold, blooming all at once to scarlet and gold.

_Do you understand?_

"Of course we will," Priory says, and squeezes Varric's shoulder, hard. "My friends are precious to me."

"Yeah," Varric says softly, and she watches him watch Hawke and Fenris, heads leaned close together over a glass of wine, black and white, dark skin and light, as Hawke pulls out a pair of lovely leather gloves to show him, oiled to a buttery sheen and tooled cuff to tip in vines and roses.

—

Hawke's brother needs no introduction when he comes. He's taller than Cullen and just as broad in the shoulder, his hair pitch-black and his eyes the same fiery blue as his sister's. He doesn't even bother removing his Warden-issue cloak when Priory calls a runner to take him to Hawke, though he is polite enough to rack his sword before he goes. He barely even acknowledges her presence once she has confirmed Hawke lives and awaits him upstairs, so fixed is he on finding her, and in fact the runner must jog a few steps to catch up to his long-legged strides before Carver allows him to take the lead.

"Bit of a tempest, that one," Sera says aside, and Priory can't help but agree.

A few hours later, when she and Cullen have at last finished the interminable stack of reports she's been putting off for three weeks, Priory stands and stretches and makes her way across Skyhold to the tower door that keeps her rooms and Hawke's. Not here, the guard tells her; they'd sent for food, and argued so loudly he could hear the voices from his post; sent for food again; then all three of them, the Champion, her brother, and the marked elf, had come down together and met Varric and Merrill here in the atrium, and they had all left a half-hour ago through the far end of the great hall. He had not inquired, no, but he'd heard one of them ask after the stairs to the Inquisition's gardens.

Her back aches; her bed calls to her for a lovely afternoon nap. The guard looks at her expectantly, ready to unlock the door at her word. It would be so easy…

She thanks him, and goes to the gardens instead.

She can hear them before she even turns the corner. Merrill is laughing, high and light as bells; Hawke and her brother are arguing over something insignificant, both voices raised and neither angry. Priory makes the last turn, her fingers trailing along the stone, and here they all are, a broad quilt spread in a corner of the gardens beneath the trellis of prophet's laurel, an open basket atop it with a half-dozen plates of cold meat, and grapes, and a small-bellied carafe of wine. Fenris and Varric sit on one stone bench abutting the trellis, Dorian and the Iron Bull on the other bench set corner; Hawke and Carver lie sprawled at their feet on the quilt, some game of stones between them the obvious source of their argument. Merrill has faded away to the self-indulgent, beautiful rosebushes a few dozen feet from the trellis with the great mabari Toby flopped at her side, but she's laughing still, and she's the first to see Priory as she comes to meet them.

"Hello," she says, with as impish a smile as she's given Priory before. "Have you come to join us?"

"I suppose I have," Priory tells her, and kneels at her direction on a spare corner of the quilt between the two benches. "It's good the wind isn't cold today."

"—no, because there were _four _in that one, so you ought to have landed—lovely afternoon, so glad to see you—_here_, and only taken these!"

"If there were only four there, _sister_, it's because you took one and hid it. I've been setting that up for two turns!"

"Prove it! Count them!"

Priory can't help her grin. Carver has shed the armor somewhere, left only in Warden leathers and light trousers, but it's still something rare and wonderful to see a man his size flat on his stomach, arguing over bright bits of colored glass with a sister he had thought dead.

"Have you been here long?" she asks Fenris, looking up at him over the edge of the stone bench. Merrill throws a stick; Toby barks raucously, chases it down, and flops to gnaw on its ends instead of returning it for a fresh throw.

He shakes his head. "She wishes to be away from the room often now. The day was warm enough, so I thought…" He makes an expressive gesture, and Varric laughs.

"It was a good thought," she says, and leans back on her hands, closing her eyes. A clear, bright day, warm with the inexorable magic of Skyhold's heart, a few birds chirping in the ground-nests they keep building in the elfroot a few rows over. A handful of gardeners and Mother Giselle still tend the rows nearest the castle, but they've given them a wide berth for their privacy, even if Mother Giselle keeps throwing benign smiles their way every few minutes. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

"You didn't," Bull says, and nods one great horn towards Carver and Hawke, who are now furiously resetting the board altogether. "Just enjoying the show."

Dorian snorts. "No one still outdoors could miss it even if they wished to. We were passing by and could hardly help overhearing ourselves, and then the Champion insisted we stay. Still, I suppose a picnic in the gardens is a pleasant-enough way to spend an afternoon."

Bull glances at him out of the corner of one eye. "You said it was quaint."

"Which is not necessarily a _bad_ thing," Dorian declares hurriedly. "There are many beautiful paintings of scenes exactly this pastoral in Skyhold's halls."

Fenris snorts without rancor, and a little silence falls, broken only by birdsong and the distant calls of one guard to another, by the clack of stones in their wood wells and the gentle sigh of afternoon breezes through the vines. Eventually, Varric begins some story of his recent trip to the Emerald Graves, about an abandoned barn with a host of half-wild cats inside who'd taken him for their own, and the mistakes in judgement he'd made in trying to leave them behind after.

It's a good story, and Varric tells it well, of course, and by the time he gets to Dalish trying to peel them off with her staff, even Carver and Hawke are laughing.

With her—

"_Oh_," says Priory, and sits straight up on the quilt.

"Something wrong?"

"No. Hawke…" How in the Maker's name has she forgotten about it all this time? "Hawke, wait here. I've got something for you."

"All right," she says slowly, but Priory's already on her feet.

Thank the Maker the barbican is so close. She must pause a moment as she passes into the cool dark of its unlit interior, waiting for her eyes to adjust, but soon enough she can make out the towering sheet-covered shape of the eluvian. Quiet now, not even a trace of magic to tug at the anchor in her palm; she touches it gratefully and turns instead to the corner where she'd thrown the weight that first day, when they'd come through the mirror in chaos and Hawke had been nearer dead than alive.

Still there.

_Good_. She takes one of the spare sheets in the corner and wraps it up as carefully as she can, somehow unwilling to mark it with the wrong hands, then carries it out into the light of day once more. They're all waiting on her when she returns, even Merrill, and Cole has come from somewhere to perch in the low branches of one of the apple trees.

"Here," she says, and thrusts the whole wrapped mess towards Hawke. "This was—when we came for you, this was my task, to look for this. I found it, but it's a little—well."

Hawke takes it, one eyebrow lifted, but the moment she feels the wood through the thin sheet the color in her face drains away. "It isn't my—" she breathes, and then she rips off the cloth so quickly it tears at one seam.

Hawke's staff.

Her father's staff, Priory knows, thanks to Fenris, and the staff she has wielded since she found it in the caverns under the Vimmark Mountains. Black oak, polished to a mirror shine, scratched here and there with Fade-scars but in better shape than it has any right to be save the twisting at its head.

"How," Hawke starts, and falls silent. She runs her touch up and down the length of it, fingering the crimson leather braiding along the shaft, slipping up to the place at the staff's crown where the wood has—exploded, Priory supposes, is the best word. What once had been four slender black arms converging to a gold-tipped point have split open with raw power, forming an elongated cloud of black wood twisted every which way, vining in and out of itself in an elegant latticework. Some of the wood has scarred ash-white at the tips from whatever magic she channeled through it at that last moment; the gold cap has melted and reformed in glittering rivulets down the fine, delicate lines of the reshaped oak.

"Not as it was," says Cole from his tree. He's crossed his legs now, balanced improbably on a pair of branches no thicker than Priory's ankles. The sunlight dapples across his broad hat. "But things change. That's all right, too."

Hawke gives a sudden, startled smile and closes her eyes. Both her hands have fisted around the neck of the staff; a moment later it begins to glow, dim and gold, and in one breath the gold whispers into Hawke instead, slipping around her like a second skin. It fades only a second or two after, and then she opens her eyes. "Well," she says, sounding less watery now, "at least _that _still works."

"Fascinating," says Dorian, leaning down close enough he can hover a palm over the head of Hawke's staff. "What an unusual adaptation. I'd love to see this in a bit more detail; perhaps in my library, where I can get to my papers."

"Whatever you want." Hawke laughs, her forehead touching briefly to the slender wood. Toby gives a woof of approval, stomping over empty plates to lick her chin. "Whatever at all. _Flames_, I can't thank you enough for this. I never thought I'd see it again."

Priory shakes her head, but Fenris's unobtrusive squeezing of Hawke's shoulder stifles her first impulse to dismiss it: only the duty, after all, of the one who placed Hawke there to begin with. "You're welcome," she says instead. "I'm glad—I'm glad it could make it home where it belongs."

"Not the only thing," Carver says, low, but before the maudlin sense can take hold of them, he pushes to his feet and stretches both arms over his head. "Well? Are we finished here?"

"Why? Are you bored?" Tart, from Hawke, but smiling.

"Maybe." He twists left, then right, shading his eyes. "I thought I saw a training ring. I might go see who's willing to knock a sword about for a while."

"_I _can help with that," the Iron Bull says, standing—towering—with a grin dangerous enough to split nails. "I've been itching to try that infamous Warden stamina, anyhow."

Carver laughs, and Varric snaps his little book shut with a click. "Tiny taking on Junior? This I _have _to see."

It's a good ending, after everything: Carver and Bull chatting amiably as they walk together towards the training grounds, Varric's quips making them both laugh; Dorian subtly running his hand down Bull's forearm with a trail of some faint magic behind it, only to be called out by Merrill for cheating. The dog romps after them, wholly delighted, and their voices rise, and drift a moment over the gardens, and then fade away.

And then it is just Hawke and Fenris and Priory—and Cole somewhere, she presumes, though he's abandoned his apple branch.

"Thank you," Hawke says again into the stillness, her fingers looped through the ties of her staff. Her eyes are very steady. "Not just for this. But for bringing Carver, and letting us stay as long as we have."

"It truly is my pleasure, Hawke."

"I'm afraid we plan to trespass on your hospitality a little longer. I can't quite ride yet, and our home is a good way north."

"Your home?"

"In Wilhaven," Fenris says, his hand slipping to the back of Hawke's neck. "A small village, not marked on most maps. Just outside of Wildervale."

"I know Wildervale. We spent some time there when I was young." She hesitates, but by now she might as well— "We have some patrols that take reports from that area. Would you like me to look into it for you, make sure the house is all right?"

"To be very honest, I was rather hoping you'd offer." Hawke starts to rise, can't quite make it on legs still not fully trustworthy, and is helped the rest of the way by her propped staff and Fenris's grip at her elbow. "I'll give you the place this afternoon. It's a bit difficult to find unless you're looking for it."

"Of course." Priory stands herself, dusting off her knees, and surveys the remnants of lunch spread across the quilt. "I'll send someone to clear this away, if you'd like to join your brother."

"I need to put my feet up a moment, but we will soon," she says, smiling, and Fenris inclines his head. Abruptly, she adds, "You're very kind, Priory. I'm glad it was you."

Oh, she's so _tired _of Hawke just—just disarming her like this with only a few words, but by the time she can come up with anything more than a simple, inadequate _thank you_, Hawke and Fenris have already begun to make their way from the gardens without her. His fingers rest at the small of her back, subtle assistance with the steps gone stilting even given the aid of her gold-tipped staff; as they pass through the archway Hawke pauses and leans to pluck a little yellow sprig of prophet's laurel from the overgrown arch above them, smells it, and then tucks it behind Fenris's ear.

Priory does not move. Hawke smiles a bit at him, her fingertips trailing down to his collar; his eyes are softer than Priory has ever seen them, and by the time he leans forward Hawke has already come to meet him in a brief, fond kiss. No more than a second or two, nothing at all but a pair of lovers in a sunlit garden, reunited after an endless road.

They part, smiling; they turn again and go together into the shadow of the colonnade.

It takes a few minutes to realize Cole is standing beside her, has been for some time. He tips his head; he says, quietly, "I thought it was dead."

"Hm?"

"The earth. Black bracken, burnt, buried under all the char. I was wrong. There's a new seed sprouting, good roots in the dark, strong with water and daylight. It's ready to be alive again."

Hawke's hand in Fenris's hand. A sprig of gold laurel behind his ear.

"Yes," says Priory, and tilts her face back into the sun.


	9. Chapter 9

**Recommended listening:** Doria (watch?v=wFp6xnJbs0w), by Olafur Arnalds. This one was new to me before the writing of this chapter, and it's honestly become one of my favorites of his.

* * *

Our two souls therefore, which are one,  
Though I must go, endure not yet  
A breach, but an expansion,  
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so  
As stiff twin compasses are two;  
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show  
To move, but doth, if the other do.  
—_A Valediction Forbidding Mourning_, John Donne

—

_Fenris_.

He knows this voice. He knows this place.

He opens his eyes. Black rock, just as before. Green-gold mists whispering words he cannot hear, swirling like a living thing around his ankles. A distant, towering shadow, too many spider-legs spearing upwards in death. He _knows_ this place.

No terror, though, for once. He has always dreaded it in the past, a revolting tension in the air that plucked at his blood and made his hands shake. But…nothing now, aside from a mild curiosity.

_Fenris_.

His feet know the way so well. No demons trouble him this time, no shadows at the edge of his vision to vanish when he looks. Only smooth black stone, cool on his bare feet, and the last turn to take him to the place where Hawke lies.

Ah.

Empty. The spiderwebs have all been cut, dangling loose and dead from the craggy boulder he has seen a thousand times in his dreams these last months. And at its base, at the place where Hawke should be kneeling, bone-thin and broken—nothing. Empty thread and mist.

"Fenris."

A woman's voice. A dragon's voice, heady with contained power. He turns without concern.

Dragon indeed. Massive, four-horned, larger even than the high dragon they fought so long ago, scarlet blazoned across its scales, its folded wings. Yellow eyes, bright and mischievous, staring directly at him on the cusp of this abandoned rock in the Fade.

"You led me here," he realizes, unhurried, unworried. This time, and a thousand times.

"There are a few places left where memory still has power." A tilt of the massive head, a blown breath through his hair that reeks of sulfur. "Fate and chance toy with all of us, little one."

"Why?"

If dragons could smile… "That girl made me laugh, once. Consider it a favor repaid."

The world has begun to shimmer, the edges blurred. The dragon has gone glass-thin, too; he can see the far reaches of the Fade directly through the scarlet wings when they spread above him. He says, "She is awake, now."

"I know." The dragon's head dips, so close he can see the coalfire burning of its yellow eyes. "And it is time, little one, that you dreamed of things beyond this place again."

He closes his eyes, and for just a moment, he feels the brush of white-hot scales across his forehead. The mist's whispering falls silent.

_It is only when you fall that you learn whether—_

He looks up—

_—you can fly—_

—

Fenris wakes up.

It's a gentle thing, easier than it has been in some time, and before the old fear can even think to rise, Hawke stirs sleepily in his arms. He hums something vague and quieting and feels her settle again with a sigh; her legs, twined through his under the duvet, shift once to something more comfortable and go still.

The dream is already fading. Enough he remembers to concern him, overlaid with a thousand dreams of the same place, the same blasted rock—but those are fading too, somehow, four months and more of grief and hurt so easily smoothed by this, Hawke's weight against his chest, her hair coming loose of its braid to tangle over his shoulder. What time…early afternoon, he guesses, lifting just far enough to see the window over Hawke's head. Not so long as he had thought. Time yet before dinner, even if Carver has likely finished at the training grounds and moved on. Time enough for him to slip down to the kitchens and fetch a tray, if he can shift from this bed without waking Hawke. They'd finished the grapes and sandwiches together before she'd proclaimed her need for a nap, and he hasn't had the chance yet to—

"You are thinking so loudly," Hawke murmurs, her voice rough with sleep, "that I bet they can hear you downstairs."

He smiles despite himself, and when she burrows back against him he wraps one arm more securely around her waist. No dream, this time; no mist to vanish with the waking. She is solid as the earth against him, and she _believes _him—believes herself, and he can hardly swallow around the sudden lump in his throat.

"My apologies," he says into her hair. "The plates are still empty."

"Please, Fenris. I'm capable of thinking of more than food these days, you know."

"Is that so?"

"Mm." She takes his hand and tugs it free, pulls it to her mouth so that she can kiss his palm. "Though if you tell me the wine's gone too, I really will fall apart."

"The wine is still here," he tells her, and lets his eyes fall shut.

Her mouth drifts aimlessly over his skin. Palm, first, then the heel of his hand, soft kisses that tease as much as comfort; little trails down each finger to the tip and back again, tugging back the sleeve of his shirt so she can reach more of his wrist. Each touch of her lips is like fire; his blood thrums at every press, heat rising slow and steady as if answering some ancient call.

She opens her mouth, lets the bare edge of teeth drag over his wrist's pulse-point; sucks gently when he inhales, and bites again.

His stomach leaps; he blows out a breath of a laugh into her hair. "You will drive me to distraction."

"That was rather the hope. How much time do we have?"

"It is still early yet. Hawke…" She's moved her teeth to the tip of his longest finger, every scrap of him desperate for more than that, and he can hardly string two thoughts together. "I had thought you…"

"You didn't recognize that spell earlier." Such a smile in her voice as she twists under his arm so that her mouth may graze down his jaw, flutter over his throat. "It's so much more effective through a staff. Rejuvenation," and she laughs again, tugging at his shirt which has suddenly gone stifling, "and stamina."

His chest is tight with anticipation and affection. "Tell me what you want, Hawke."

"I want a bath."

Fenris pauses, his fingers already buried in her hair. He knows her too well after all this time. "A bath."

"Yes," she says, and her eyelids flutter when his fingers drift to the high collar of her tunic. "I want to be clean. Aggressively, _expensively_ clean," she adds, forestalling his protest. "Not that your sponge-baths haven't been delightful in their own way. But I happen to know that there is a proper bathing room with an enormous runed tub just next door, and I want to use it. I want the scents, and the salts and the oils that I know are in there on a fancy tray, and the water as hot as can be borne, and I want you to come in there and share it with me."

He laughs despite himself. "This is no hardship, Hawke."

"I want," she breathes, and he knows she must be able to feel his heartbeat leaping in his throat where she kisses it. "I want the wettest, most ridiculous foreplay anyone's ever gotten out of a bathtub in the history of the world, and then I want you to bring me back into this room and keep me here until dinner. Maybe through it, if we're both lucky."

"Hawke," he sighs into her hair, and again, and again, reveling in the way she shudders every time. "If you have wanted this so long, you had only to ask."

"Not so long. I only found out about the bathtub yesterday."

Fenris laughs, and when she kisses his chin and pulls away, he lets her go. Her eyes are bright as she smiles at him over her shoulder and his heart swells; time enough, time enough for everything he wants and more.

It's a slow, languorous afternoon; even the bathing room is heavy with afternoon sunlight, gold and syrup-thick through the high windows, catching brilliantly on the lines of the teakwood and iron and polished enamel of the bathtub that sits in the middle of the porcelain tile. A small pump in the corner of the room fills the fine bucket beneath it with clear mountain springwater; this becomes Fenris's task, carrying the water to the tub and filling it as Hawke runs her fingers over the runes set at its base and wakes them, one by one.

Hawke is beautiful.

She has not always been, not to him. Those first days he had seen only the promise of death and iron; for himself, first, and later when he realized her magic meant no threat to him, for their enemies. Even when he had not known the heart beneath he had known how dangerous her face might be; and then he had come to love her, and the long nose and the strong jaw had become such precious things, precious beyond price. He had feared her too, after that, because what was his freedom worth after all this flight, after all this _death_, if he were to turn and place it so swiftly in the hands of another mage without a challenge?

Ah, but she had given him hers in its place. Cupped hands around his heart to keep away the thorns that snatched at him still; and her own heart held within, effortless in the offering, shield and balm in one to cover all the places still too bruised to beat, patient, until he might begin to heal again.

Surely a better bargain on his end, he thinks, as Hawke abandons the runes and the half-filled tub to come sit on his knee. She takes his face in her hands and kisses him, and his heart clenches and leaps as it has every time since she woke and began to reach for him once more. So simple. So right, the way she fits in his arms again, as if she had never died at all.

The tub fills. The runes heat, and the steam begins to rise as ready as a promise. Fenris divests himself of his shirt and begins to work the toggles of Hawke's tunic, impeded only slightly by the way she twists to kiss him every chance she has. Then—free at last, only her red breastband beneath, and then he must step out of his trousers, too, because she has undone the laces while he has been distracted and they hang dangerously low on his hips.

"I missed you," she says suddenly, softly, and the words hang suspended in the sunlit warmth.

Fenris kisses her again, deliberate and deep and with his hands in her hair. "And I, you," he murmurs against her mouth, and mentions nothing of the taste of salt.

Eventually, she pulls away; eventually, she rids herself of the rest of her clothing, and him of his own, and sorts through the tray of little glass jars until she finds some scent she likes, something heavy with spice and citrus, and upends the whole vial into the bath. Salts, too, and a handful of dried petals he doesn't recognize— "We're going to be _decadent_, Fenris, whether you like it or not," and sets two bars of castile soap on a nearby towel so fluffy he's almost concerned by it.

He steps in first, hissing at the glorious heat soaking up to his knees, and reaches a hand back to Hawke. She takes it, smiling, but only looks at him and does not move.

"Is something wrong?"

She shakes her head, her blue eyes brilliant; her fingers tighten around his. "I love you, Fenris."

His throat closes.

He does not deserve this. This impossible woman, who loved him when he scarcely knew what it meant to not _hate_, who stands before him bare and beautiful, white skin marked down with years of scars and still so perfect he can hardly bear it.

"_Avis_," he says, rough and tender; the words are strange to him, said only a handful of times in the years since he has bound himself to her, but somehow—here, in this room with nothing between them but a little time, they are so easy. "I love you."

Her breath catches. She comes to him then, a little unsteady, and lets him help her into the bathtub at last; they find their way to one end of the polished curve where they can fit comfortably together, her back drawn up to his chest, his knees bent alongside her own. The heated water reaches to her collarbone, almost to his once they are seated; it's hot enough to flush his face and soothe the lyrium into quiescence, and soon enough Hawke's heartbeat thumps just as heavy as his under his skin.

They say nothing for a long time. No need, not now; eventually she reaches for one of the soap bars and begins a white lather over her arms. He takes the second and soaps himself, rinses, soaps again down Hawke's back, digging his fingers into the muscles of her spine until the last of the tension melts away. He finds the cedar oil he likes best and works it into his own hair, and then Hawke's, and dips clean ladlefuls of bathwater over them both; the room begins to fill with the smell of oranges and comfrey and cloves, with the sounds of little ripples as Hawke leans back against him and lets out a soul-deep sigh.

"Fenris."

Lazy with heat soaking through every inch of him, with the weight of Hawke on his chest, her wet hair on his shoulder. "Mm."

"I kissed a few of them, you know." She's been toying with one of the dried petals, drawing it up and down the lyrium of his knee where it bends out of the water; now she turns to look up at him, her naked skin slipping smoothly over his. "In the Fade."

Should he care? All this time and she has come back to _him_, and he cannot seem to find anything but warmth. "It doesn't matter, Hawke."

"Well, it was only because I thought they were you." She turns back now, abandoning the petal to the water, and runs her hands down both his thighs. Her right thumb begins slow circles into the side of his knee; the lyrium follows, little gleams of white in the steam, and he lets out a shaky breath. "Nothing more than that, though. For some reason all the desire demons always gave you a _massively _huge—"

"_Hawke,_" he says, smiling.

She grins herself, twisting until her mouth is almost at his ear. "Cock," she whispers in some thin attempt at seduction, and dissolves into helpless laughter.

He can't help it; he wraps both arms around her from behind, bending forward until as much of his skin touches hers as possible, even in the slosh of this water that will never go cold. "You are a fool," he says into her hair, and loves her.

"Maker, don't I know it." She kisses him, wet and hot and messy, and drags her hand a little higher up his thigh. "Let me turn around. I can't get at you properly like this."

The easiest thing in the world. He loosens his arms the barest amount and she turns within them, her breasts sliding smooth and heavy against his chest, her legs coming to crook comfortably around his hips. So close, so close—and all the time they want, he knows, and lets himself let _go, _nothing but Hawke's mouth and Hawke's hands and the way her fingers trail up and down his neck, rubbing welcome heat into the sore places of his shoulders, dancing lightly down the length of his ear until the lyrium flickers in protest.

The dead could never be so lovely. His hands slide aimlessly over her back, her waist, curving over her arse and the renewing muscles of her thighs. Every now and then he trips over a scar, some old enough his fingers do not hesitate—the great swathing stripe left by the Arishok here, the four ridges in a row where a wyvern once broke through—and others, newer, give him pause, the white circles down her throat and her arms, a broad pucker at the base of one shoulder where Nightmare left its mark. A long, crooked line just below her left knee where the bone broke through, healed now to nothing but memory.

Time enough to learn them all. He is in no hurry.

Hawke mouths his throat lazily, as if she has read his mind, and one hand slips down his chest, idly toying with his nipple, moving to squeeze his arm where he holds her. He can feel her smile when his breath catches, and even that dazed annoyance is a cherished thing; she lets her fingernails follow down the rivulets of water from his hair, a mirrored path, and her lips trail after, the heat of her openmouthed kisses and gentle bites soothing the gooseflesh she has raised.

And now he is stirring, even through the indolent heat, his blood hot and heavy as Hawke rouses it with her touch.

He knows she can feel it, pressed together as they are; she whispers his name, low and fond, and kisses him so gently his eyes sting. "Fenris," she says again, her gaze warm and dark and growing darker, and the room filled with spice and oranges. "Will you take me to bed, or am I going to have to carry you there myself?"

He laughs, almost giddy with gladness, and revels in the pleasure of it; he stands in a rush of water and steps carefully from the tub to the steam-damp tile. Hawke follows, only stumbling once, and submits him to only the briefest toweling-off before he can wait no longer and must have her in his arms again.

It's an uncertain dance, the long walk back to their bed; every few steps forward are undone when she pulls him back to kiss her, or when he tangles his arms around her waist and holds her tight enough he can remind himself that she is real.

She is real. She is _awake_…

By the time they make it back to the bed they're both breathing harder than the little distance should allow. He leans her back on the bed carefully, her wet hair staining the pillow, and she is so beautiful, so beautiful, and she was dead—

"Fenris," Hawke says softly, and links her hands behind his neck. "I'm not going anywhere."

His voice is gravel-rough, tight with four months of grief he will carry with him always. "You had better not," he tells her, and leans down to meet her mouth.

It's a harder kiss than before, but that is right, too. A fire has started beneath his skin, eager beyond reason; her hands turn rougher on his back, her nails digging into him to hold him closer, closer, and still not close enough. He snakes an arm under her waist and one of her legs hooks over the back of his thigh, still slick and hot from the bathwater.

"_Venhedis_," he rasps, and stifles her smirk with an openmouthed kiss. She lets him, her arms wrapped tight around his neck; then she bites his lower lip, and breathes a laugh into his mouth when he curses again before soothing it with her tongue.

"It's been a while," she tells him, low and amused and just the barest hint of self-conscious as she trails one finger along his cheek. "You'll have to take your time."

He can do that. Venhedis, four months—he drowned in the sorrow, once, and knows now how terrible the hope and joy can be after, too, a fever ignited like oil to blind him to all else. An hour had been a lifetime to endure before, the weight as crushing as a hundred stones; now Hawke is alive and warm beneath his hands, her eyes bright and fixed on him like she might be unmade if he were to let her go, and a thousand years would never be enough. _Take your time._

And so he does, over the next quarter-hour, half-hour, all time lost in the sunlit afternoon of this room. He rolls to his back, letting Hawke settle carefully over his waist; when she bends down to kiss him again his thumbs stroke over the lines of her neck, her collarbone, her breasts, until she breaks away and buries her head in his neck and his pulse hammers in his throat. Even after all this time he remembers what she likes best, affectionate nips at the skin beneath her ear as his other hand slides down the too-thin slope of her waist and lower, finding her ready, coaxing her readier still.

She comes around his fingers, silent to bursting, her whole body tensing suddenly enough in his arms that he must get a better grip at her waist; her teeth close blindly on his shoulder with no voice. Eventually she comes down, her thighs trembling, and drapes herself catlike over his chest. Heat ripples from her skin to his, enough to set the lyrium afire, but there is no pain with it, only the low familiar rill of Hawke's magic and the sense that the world has been remade at last.

"A good start," she says, voice catching between the words, her eyes still closed. "I knew you had it in you."

He laughs. "This is only the beginning, Hawke."

"Oh, serah, how _cocky_. Maybe those demons were right after all—mmph—"

She still tastes like the bathwater's spices, her damp hair twisted around his hands. "Just let me—" he starts, and hardly knows how to finish. There aren't enough words in him for overfull his heart has become, a little sun swollen past its bindings, bleeding light at every seam.

Hawke sees it, though, as she's seen through him since the start. "Whatever you wish," she says, soft, and leans down for a gentler kiss. "Though I'm afraid you'll have to take the top. My legs are killing me."

He nods, and eases her to her back again. Whatever the Inquisition has done for her, she's still thin enough he does not—_like_ it, kissing his way down ribs like ladder-rungs, across hip-bones too sharp for her shape. But that can be mended, he tells himself, and settles between her legs, kindling her with lips and tongue until she rises again, slow and inexorable as a star, her fingers clenched in his hair. All the time in the world.

She rides this one a little longer; he stays as long as she needs, coaxing her back into the slow fall, and as at last she blinks the daze from her eyes he turns his head and drops leisurely, languid kisses along the inside of her thigh.

"Fenris," she says, and her voice trembles as if she is on the verge of flying apart. "Come here. Come up here where I can kiss you."

Eager as he is. He shifts up, one hand splaying into her hair at the nape of her neck, the other palming the weight of her breast. His blood pounds distantly in his ears, his own need so easily forgotten, like air. "I—_missed_ you, Hawke."

"Like rain on the fields," she agrees, and slips her own hand between them, wrapping around him in a way that makes him gasp and shudder like a novice. "Fenris, I'm as ready as I'll ever be, and I'm sick to death of waiting."

More in that than just _now_, but he doesn't waste time with questions. He kisses her instead, a starving man given way at a feast, and when she lifts her hips he moves carefully—so carefully—to meet her. She gasps once or twice, her eyes pinching shut, and he stops, wretched—but her hands on his shoulder permit no retreat, and soon enough she wraps one sweat-slick leg around his waist and lets out a long, low sigh of such immense satisfaction his eyes sting.

"I love you," she says again, meeting his gaze directly. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes bright as the summer sky. "I always have. Across two worlds, and who knows how many dreams."

Fenris is silent, elation and an insatiable yearning snarled together in his throat to dam up any answer. He kisses her instead, hoping against reason it can convey to her what he means without something so useless as _words_; she pulls the tie from his hair and runs her fingers through the white length of it, gathering it over one of his shoulders as he begins to move at last.

Effortless as falling, even after all this time. This rhythm runs as deep in him as blood; he finds her fingers and entwines them with his own, unhurried, sea-steady. Her other hand slides up his back, his shoulder, along his cheek, and the glowlight of lyrium reflects gently in her eyes. Her magic has long been loosed from the confines of her skin, and it wraps around them both in warm, rippling brushes as delicate as lace.

"You are beautiful," he says roughly, and drops his head to kiss the new scars along her neck. "Beautiful," he repeats against her skin when he can sense the rising protest, and when she still would speak he seals her mouth with his own. She shivers at the touch; he shudders himself, incapable of checking the surge of affection at how effortlessly she has always welcomed his need to touch her like this—welcomed _him_, when even he could not bear himself. Loved him—

She gulps for air now, her stomach hitching against his, his fingers digging into her hip as he adjusts the angle for her. She will not last long, not when she still runs so hot; but neither will he after all this time, and even this, even this quick-glass moment caught in a golden afternoon—

It is enough. It is only the start.

"Fenris," she sighs, when his pace hastens at last, when his trembling fingers find the pounding beat of her heart and stay there. "Fenris, will you—"

And he does, lyrium singing, reaching down for the last pressured touch she needs to tumble over the edge. A quick glimmer of lyrium-light and every muscle in her body goes taut, her fingers bruising on his back; he relishes it, soaks in every pant and cry as he brings her face back to his where he can see her, where the thin grey mist of his dreams can vanish before her perfect fire-gold heat. She kisses him blindly, gasps his name into his mouth—and that is enough.

He follows her over, light bursting behind his eyes, his shout buried in Hawke's throat. Flame roars through every vein, answering her demand like a cry.

By the time Fenris comes back to himself again the sweat has begun to cool, and Hawke's fingers stroke through his hair. He fumbles for her other hand, finds it, and tangles his with hers until the sense of unmooring dwindles away. Awake. Awake, alive.

_Alive._

"I love you," Hawke says again into the soft silence, and kisses the tip of his ear. "I'm sorry. I can't seem to get enough of saying it out loud."

He will never tire of hearing it. Never.

"There's wine, if you want it."

"Later," he says, his voice gone husky, and brushes his cheek against her cheek. "Let me have this first."

Her eyes soften, crown-blue, so warm he could burn to nothing in them and be glad of it. "As you like, lover."

Eventually, he lifts his head enough to see the sunlight through the window. Late. Not so late dinner has begun without them, but close enough he must speak through the reluctance. "If you wish to go downstairs for dinner, we should dress. It is nearly time." Not that he has the slightest interest in moving even a single muscle, but she's the one who's been on the edge of starving for months.

But Hawke laughs and turns on her side, curling into his arms so fully that a new, quiet euphoria courses through him. "I have you. I have wine. Fenris, I'm the richest girl in the world."

He'd seen Varric use a line, once. Drunk on love, or something like it. How foolish, that he'd never understood its meaning until now.

The long thorns around his heart draw back, and fade, and wither into nothing. After all this, there is nothing he has left to fear: only one day at a time, one hour, with Hawke beside him at every step. Hawke, who is alive, who loves him, who will never wake alone again if he can help it.

He closes his eyes, his nose tucked under Hawke's ear, her skin clean and rich with the smell of cloves and oranges.

A promise, for a heart given back its beating.


	10. Chapter 10

**AN: **It's been a good minute since I've been able to wrap up a longer piece like this, and it's honestly a wonderful feeling to be able to do it again now. It was a serious struggle to write for a long time, thanks both to work and some personal issues, but finishing this—finishing _and posting_ this, I should say—was a critical reminder of why Hawke & Fenris & writing in general have always been so important to me.

Thank you so, so much for every comment and kudos you guys have left over this handful of weeks. Those email notifications have been embarrassingly important to me, and I've gone back to read them multiple times since starting to post. Thank you for taking the time to share in this goofy world that keeps reeling me back in every time I think I've gotten free.

Cheers!

**Recommended listening:** Storytime (watch?v=-Xs_LtRTQrc), from The Road OST, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Letters Of A Traveller (watch?v=GDC0KPM0384), by Alice Sara Ott and Olafur Arnalds.

* * *

A DROP fell on the apple tree  
Another on the roof;  
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,  
And made the gables laugh.

A few went out to help the brook,  
That went to help the sea.  
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls,  
What necklaces could be!  
—Emily Dickinson

And though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.  
—_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Charles Dickens

—

Hawke stands on the highest western tower of Skyhold and shades her eyes with her hand. Overcast today, the clouds grey and thick with the promise of rain, but not yet hung so low she cannot see the craggy mountaintops arrayed before her. Such a wide world. Such a wide, endless, wonderful world, waiting only for her feet to unfold it.

Toby nudges her hip plaintively, and she scratches behind his ears until he sits, leaning hard enough against her legs she must brace herself on the crenellations. The comforting weight of her father's staff digs into the mortar, and she adjusts her grip along its leather braiding until the old magic hums in her skin again. The wind picks up, cold and smelling of rain; she turns her face into it, letting it blow the hair from her eyes and tease strands from the tail at the nape of her neck.

A good wind. A good rain, soon…

The door at the top of the stairs creaks open behind her, and Hawke turns to see Cullen emerge from the dimness, a bottle in one hand and a book in the other. He looks just as surprised as she feels.

"I'm sorry," he says after a moment of dumbfounded silence. "I did not realize—forgive me for disturbing you."

"Not at all," she tells him with a quick gesture, waylaying his step back into the dark. "Come on, there's plenty of room for the both of us, if you don't mind the company."

He smiles, scarred lip uneven. "Not at all."

He takes the chair she has ignored, an old wooden thing beaten to bare nails by the elements, and drags it to the wall beside her. It creaks dangerously when he sits, but holds—at least for the moment—and Toby immediately presents his neck to Cullen's lap for pets.

He obliges, furthering Hawke's estimation of his character, and leans back in the chair with a sigh. "I did not think anyone came here aside from me."

"I like it," Hawke says, and turns her face back into the wind. "It clears my head, after the dreams."

"You still dream, then."

Now she smiles, shaking her head. "A trade for a trade. What have you got in that bottle?"

"Terrible Antivan wine, unfortunately. I developed a taste for it in Kirkwall and have never found anyone willing to share it."

"Luckily for you, I have all the refined palate of good Fereldan cow dung." She accepts the proffered bottle, already uncorked, and takes a long swallow. It _is _terrible, sweet and bitter at once with an aftertaste like syrup, but she didn't live three years on the shit side of Lowtown for nothing. "Horrible. I adore it."

Cullen laughs and takes back the bottle. A small sip of his own; then he places the unopened book on the stonework beside him and thumbs the murky green glass with both hands. "Somehow I had thought you might not have to dream again, after all this."

"I am a mage. I will be bound to the Fade until I die, for better or worse." She opens a palm before her, letting that familiar blue-white soulfire gleam a moment before stifling it in her fist. "Most of the time they are just as I used to dream. Easy enough to see through the illusions of my dead parents, or the house in Lothering I know no longer exists."

"Most of the time?" He pauses. "Forgive me. This is intrusive. There's no need to answer."

"I don't mind. It helps, really." And it honestly does; for all the wounds she carries now this is only the barest edge of a bruise, a bit purple, a bit tender. No more than that. "The powerful ones can see where I've been. Those are the ones who place me back on that rock, back in the spider-threads, and tell me everything that has happened here was only a dream. Thank the Maker those are rare enough."

Cullen looks at her, serious and thoughtful. "And how do you best those?"

"Is this idle curiosity, or a professional inquiry?"

The scarred lip hooks up into a smile. "Both, perhaps. Perhaps a little personal as well."

Hawke laughs, swiveling to lean her back against the crenellation. The damp wind tickles the nape of her neck, teases down the hem of her cloak. "It's very stupid, Cullen. I yell at them."

"You…yell."

"Oh, yes. Hands on my hips—" she demonstrates— "and absolutely seething with righteous fury. I shout them down until they give up and slink away or turn on me for the fight, either of which I much prefer to the illusions. It helps to think of Fenris's face when he's particularly annoyed with me; it's excellent inspiration."

"I see." He takes another swallow from the bottle and lifts it in a brief toast. "Perhaps I'll try yelling myself, next time."

"Sometimes it doesn't work," she warns him, but the affection is already in her voice, and she doesn't mind the sharing of it. "But Fenris is there when that happens. When I wake up, and I don't remember what is real." She glances at him from the corner of her eye. "Priory has said you have trouble sleeping."

Cullen leans the chair back on two legs, displaying an enormous faith in joists Hawke wouldn't trust with a child's doll. One gloved hand scratches down Toby's ruff; the mabari's tongue lolls out in a delighted pant. "I stopped taking the lyrium. They were, at first…they are not so bad now as they were. Less frequent, as well."

"I'll hope for the same in my case, then." Hawke looks back over her shoulder at the mountains, reassuring, unchanged. "I was surprised when I heard you were here, you know."

"Kirkwall led all of us to strange places."

"Very," she says softly. A little flock of birds swoops down into a stand of pines and up again, and Hawke straightens. "Cullen, Fenris and I are going to go home soon. To our house in Wilhaven, where I have a garden with a hedge and dried herbs hanging from my kitchen window, if it hasn't all been picked over by our nosy neighbors. I am going to marry him there, and if I have any say in it, we are not going to leave again for an age."

"I understand." He looks at his hands, tight around the bottle, and then back up at her. "I had heard you still keep the title to the estate in Kirkwall."

"I do. We go there occasionally when Aveline has a child, or when Varric has need of some piece of information he cannot get on his own. He has said he may come back to join us, once your Inquisitor has no more need of him. _Shit_," she says, and can't help the laugh that barks out of her. "What a travesty. To love that cesspit of a city, even after all this time."

"You, or Varric?"

"Yes," she says with only a little bitterness, and smiles. "I was tempered in Kirkwall. It wasn't the forge I would have chosen, but I could not have lived through this—" her gesture encompasses all of Skyhold— "without the sinter it made of me."

"They say fire tests gold."

"Flatterer," Hawke says, and runs her hand along the slender reshaping of her staff's head. "If you smite me again, I'll knock you right off this wall. I won't even need magic."

"My apologies. If I'd seen another way, I'd have taken it."

"Hm. Well, I do apologize for the spitting." She straightens the staff, letting it bear a portion of her weight once more. "And you? Where will you go, now that the breaches are sealed?"

He blushes, surprising her, and rubs the back of his neck. "Wherever the Inquisitor has need of me," he says at last.

Hawke hums, but she likes Priory too well to tease Cullen about her now, and lets it go. "It's going to rain," she says instead, looking out across the battlements to the places where the clouds have swollen. Toby lies down at her side, his head resting on her booted foot.

Cullen nods, and passes her the bottle once more. She takes it, and drinks, and hands it back again, and so they pass it back and forth until the bottle is nothing but dregs; the grey sky rolls down in silence, grand and heavy, and at last the first cool drops of rain begin to patter down around them.

—

"_Here_ you are," says Hawke.

Fenris looks up at her from his bench under the colonnade and smiles. And _oh,_ if he doesn't look delectable, leaned up longways against the wide column at the bench's end, that well-made dark shirt baring the curve of his collarbone, the snug leggings hinting at just enough of the well-defined muscle beneath to make her mouth water. He's crooked one knee high enough to prop up the spine of his book; the other leg dangles off the bench just so, his bare toes splayed solidly on stone. Ah, but time for that later. "What happened to the dog?" he asks, and it takes her a good ten seconds to parse the question instead of just staring at his magnificent mouth.

"He's with Carver in the hall, getting lunch," she says, walking towards him. "I'll join you, if you don't mind."

He raises one black eyebrow but does not protest. While she'd prefer to sit in his lap, this colonnade that runs the perimeter of the Inquisition's gardens is not wholly private, even with the rain that continues to fall in steady sheets around them. A pair of Cullen's guards stands at one end of the walkway, talking quietly to each other; at the far corner a gardener in a leather apron kneels to sort through bright red and orange geraniums for the planting, their terracotta pots clacking together gently through the sound of the rain.

Hawke settles instead for peeling off her own boots and tucking them neatly beneath the bench, then folding the cloak atop them to leave her in only the lavender tunic and the trousers that are soft as sin. His doing, she's sure, and she loves him for it. She perches herself sideways on the bench's other end so that she faces him, a wide, square wood post at her back as well; the bench itself is stone and polished kingwood, smooth and cool on her bare feet. She wraps her arms loosely around her knees and leans her chin on her elbow. "What are you reading?"

"Varric's latest," he says, showing her the cover. A hero in useless chainmail that covers nothing but his shoulders; a heroine with a flaming shield held across both of them in righteous fury.

"How is it?"

"Unpardonable," Fenris says, smiling. "Would you care for it when I'm through?"

"Yes, _please_." Her knee can't quite reach his at this distance, but she can easily bump his calf with her own. "All these little things you thought you'd never get to do again, hm? Lend me books I'll never return. Listen to me tease Varric for his more paltry efforts to his face."

Fenris dogears his page and closes the book. He smiles again, but the rainfall dims his face. "I look forward to them."

"Speaking of insignificant things, I ran into Cullen a little while ago. Up on the tower."

"Is that so?"

"Mm. He has nightmares too, he says. Well, not directly. Intimated. You know how close dear Cullen and I are, these days."

Fenris rolls his eyes. "I'm sure he would make a similar assessment of your friendship."

"I'm _sure_. Anyway, he says his have gotten better over time. They've eased a bit, aren't as bad as they used to be." Hawke links her fingers together and stretches out her arms, curls her bare toes against the bench. "So perhaps you won't have to pat my head back into reality every other night forever."

"It would not matter if it were every night." No change to his voice, even and steady as the rain drumming on the arched overhang above them, but a stern light in his eyes quiets her protest.

"All right," she says instead, quirking a smile, and rests her head on her knees to watch the rain.

The drizzle shows no signs of stopping. The sky is still just as thick with clouds, just as insistently grey; the gold laurel still shivers on its trellis nearest them with the water's beating, clear beads rolling off leaf-tips to land on the elfroot bushes below. Every now and then heavier drips fall from the intricate stone-carved crowns of each archway, a soft flat splash to offset the more constant thrum of rainwater on soil. In the distance, she can just make out the quiet grey shape of some guard on her patrol of the northern wall in a heavy oiled cloak, her pace placid and smooth as she walks from one tower to the other and back again.

Thunder rolls across the mountains, distant and faint and low. Hawke looks over from her knees to see Fenris watching the rain as well, his head leant back against the post, his eyes half-lidded; she winks and he smiles back, slow as summer.

"I do not think," he says at last, without moving, "the roof of the house was ready for the spring storms when we left."

She snorts into her knees. "Certainly not. I could fit my entire fist through some of those holes. It'll be a mess by the time we get back to it."

He flicks a bit of hair from his brow, the white braid sliding an inch or two further down his shoulder. "Only a while longer."

"A very short while. I'm ready to go home." She lets the downpour fill the momentary lull, listening to the raindrops rattle across the gardener's terracotta pots. "I told Cullen we would be leaving soon. I plan to tell Priory at dinner tonight, if you've no objection."

"None at all."

Hawke glances up at him through her eyelashes. "I told him I intend to marry you, once we get home."

His breath hitches. A heartbeat passes without movement, then two; then his eyes slide to hers, a faint smile on his lips. "I would like that, Hawke. Very much."

"Well, good." She looks back to the gardens, green leaves trembling under the rainfall, her heart light as a bird's wing. "I bet the valerian has completely overrun the garden. Merrill told me not to plant it if I couldn't watch its flowering."

"I expect you will manage somehow."

"_Somehow_," she sighs dramatically, and tucks in her feet a little closer against the cool, damp air. "I'll manage that certain devastation if you mend the roof."

"If you insist," he says, longsuffering, but she knows him too well to miss the fondness in it. The conversation turns after that, wandering to the ship Isabela will bring to them at Jader, the winding route they will sail after to Ostwick, and then the road to Starkhaven, and then home to Wilhaven at last. She will be home. _They_ will be home.

He tells her of the letters he will write from their oak table to answer Aveline and Donnic, confirming they may come as soon as they are settled. He tells her of the bridge he will build at the southern corner of the field, where the little creek crosses into the woods. She tells him about the lemon balm she will plant again when they are home, the thyme and rosemary she will dry again and hang from the beam above the kitchen window.

The rain continues, steady, soothing. The minutes fade into each other, blurred into the quiet drum of drips on leaves and the bobbing of pennyroyal heads grown heavy with rainwater.

There is time enough, after all. Time enough for all things; but for now, they content themselves with these little dreams built here between them.

—

end.


End file.
